"Somewhere Out There" - Part Five

 

Part Five

            Rania could not tell how many cackling cats there were surrounding the cage in which she and her friends suddenly found themselves. She never would have imagined the Archivist to be one of those cats. He wasn’t laughing with them; instead, he merely glared at the mice he had trapped.

            “Nice form you took,” Rania mocked him.

            “It seemed appropriate, under the circumstances of my visit to this realm,” the Archivist said.

            “And what ‘circumstances’ would those be?” Rania asked.

            “The National Institute of Mental Health—or ‘NIMH,’ as the people of this world call it,” the Archivist disclosed. “The rats they have experimented on at the institute—I need the super intelligence they were granted with to construct a vital component for a machine that will—” He stopped once he heard Rania and Jennifer suddenly laughing hysterically inside the cage. They were laughing harder than Warren and his gang had a moment ago. “What’s so funny?” Neither of the women answered, only infuriating the Archivist to the point that he snatched Jennifer out of the cage and shouted to her tiny form, “WHAT’S SO FUNNY?!?!”

            “You are, ding-dong!” Leeka snickered. “You got the wrong dang dimension!”

            The Archivist’s pink feline nostrils flared. “What?!”

            “I’m afraid you’re nowhere close to the Secret of NIMH,” Rania told him with a smugness that she knew would trigger the Promethean.

            “What kind of ‘Archivist’ are you?” Jennifer guffawed.

            For the first time in possibly a very long time, the Archivist looked befuddled. “But…this world…it has talking rodents!”

            “So does Stuart Little—don’t mean he was experimented on by lab coats!” Jennifer couldn’t stop herself from laughing with every remark. It only made the Archivist feel angrier, but the immortal captain didn’t care.

            But it was what Tyler said that really burned him. “Don’t beat yourself up, dude. I get all these ‘talking mice’ movies confused, too.” It wasn’t enough that the Archivist made such a human mistake, but to have a human rub it in his face? That was unacceptable!

            “Face it, Gollum,” Jennifer added with another insult. “You wasted a trip, disguising yourself like some ghetto Taco Bell chihuahua!”

            “Is that so, Captain?” The Archivist snarled, hurling Leeka back into the cage with a small, sickening thud. He then decided to cope with his error. “It doesn’t matter. With all of you now trapped like the vermin that you are, I can continue with my plans elsewhere and not have to concern myself with your meddling.” On his way out, he turned to Warren and said, “They’re all yours.”

            Rania watched the Archivist retreat back into the shadows, presumably vanishing out of the American Tail realm altogether.

            “What a weird guy,” Warren said of the Archivist as soon as the Promethean was out of the picture. “But he did give us a good head start on Mausheimer.” After a long, evil snicker, he monologued, “Organizing a fake rally at the Chelsea Pier was pretty genius, wasn’t it, boys?” The Maulers—being the yes-men they were—all concurred without hesitation. “Good thing I thought of it, eh?”

            A small cockroach wearing dignified clothing leapt onto Warren’s left shoulder. “You thought of it? I was the one who—” His statement was cut short when Warren flicked him off his shoulder.

            “Once all those mice are gathered together, it’ll be an all-you-can-eat buffet,” Warren hungrily licked his lips.

            Hearing his sinister scheme, Rania gasped. “It’ll be a massacre!”

            “Meh, potato-tomato,” Warren shrugged impassively. “Tiger! Get over here!”

            On his summoning, out of the crowd of Mauler cats stepped an enormous, chubby cat with long orange fur, pale off-white fur on his belly and his cheeks, and dark brown fur around his eyes and on his paws. He stood at attention and saluted like a soldier. “You bellowed, boss?”

            Warren was clearly annoyed by the dimwitted Tiger. “Just shut up and keep guard of our dessert ‘til we get back.” He gestured to the imprisoned Rania, Tyler, Jennifer, and Fievel.

            “Keep guard of the dessert—gotcha!” Tiger accepted his orders.

            On that note, Warren and the rest of the Maulers departed.

            Once they were gone, Rania and Jennifer exchanged a brief, determined glance, as if to agree they were on the same page about finding a way out of the cage and stopping Warren and the Maulers. With the Archivist no longer a threat to Fievel’s world, that was their primary objective.

            Both women proceeded to scan the mouse cage with their sonic screwdriver and vortex manipulator, respectively. “Quantinuum locks,” Rania discovered from her sonic’s readings. “They can only be opened at a certain series of pitches.”

            “Dang!” Leeka groaned. “It’s gonna be tricky as heck to get outta this thing.”

            All their technobabble was lost on Tyler and Fievel. “Pitches? You mean like singing?” the former inquired.

            “Not really, no,” Rania told him. “The pitches aren’t necessarily in song—more like in beats.”

            “I got it!” Jennifer cheered with the snap of her fingers. “The locks back at the Torchwood America hub are quantinuum. We open them from inside the base with a sequencer to avoid outside breaches.”

            “Great,” Rania patronized. “If only you had it outside the base right now.”

            “Cool them big ol’ buns, hon, and let me cook for a sec,” Leeka smirked. “First things first—we need to deal with Tony the Tiger over there.” She nodded towards Tiger, who mischievously stomped around their cage, neglecting his guard duties in favor of playacting as one. He only stopped when Jennifer called to him, “Yoo-Hoo! Tiger, honey!”

            “Huh?” Tiger doltishly muttered. Looking at their cage, he set his gaze on the lovely mouse in the long gray trench coat. Tiger was smitten. “How can I be of service to a pair of beautiful blue eyes like those in your itty-bitty head?”

            “Oh, you are the charmer,” Jennifer flirted with the cat. “And that voice! Oooh! Ya make a girl wanna go on a cannonball run, if ya know what I mean!”

            “I don’t actually, but it sounds fun!” Tiger beamed.

            “Ya know what would be more fun?” Leeka suddenly snatched Tyler by his shoulders and yanked him in front of her, blocking herself from Tiger’s line of sight. “Gettin’ to know my buddy Tyler here! You two have a lot in common!”

            “We do?” Both Tyler and Tiger reacted skeptically.

            “Suuuuure,” Leeka said while discreetly retrieving her phone from her coat. “Your names sound alike—Tyler and Tiger—and you’re both vegetarians…eh…I’m sure y’all can come up with more from there.” Leaving the rest up to Tyler, she candidly scrolled through her contact list—an endless list of names from people she knew all over the world (her world) and beyond—until she reached the one that she sought: Archie Wyld. Right away, she thumbed the ‘FaceTime’ button.

            After a few rings, a young curly-haired man in glasses appeared on her phone. “Jenn? Is that you?” He frowned as he gazed at the mouse who dressed just like his boss. “What app are you using for this filter? It looks dope. Makes you look like a cartoon.”

            “That’s ‘cause I am a cartoon, dum-dum!” Jennifer retorted. “I’m in the Infinite DC, and I got myself stuck in a mousetrap.” She noticed a smirk forming on Wyld’s face. “Wipe that grin off your face, boy, or I’ll kick your sorry butt once I’m back in Washington!”

            “Right,” Archie composed himself. “Whatcha need, boss?”

            “I need you to activate the sequencer.”

            “I thought you said you were in the Infinite DC?”

            “I am, dingbat!”

            “Then why do you need me to activate the sequencer when you’re not even inside or anywhere near the hub? Is this some sort of test?”

            Leeka was losing patience. “Boy, the only test I’m gonna give you is the one where I see how far my foot goes down your throat, if you don’t activate that dang sequencer like I done told you!”

            “Alright, alright,” Archie conceded. “This goes completely against protocol, but what the hey, right?” He proceeded to type on his station’s keyboard, inputting the complex 15-digit code that activated the Torchwood sequencer. The unique beats played from Archie’s computer resonated over Jennifer’s phone.

            The mouse cage snapped open within the heartbeat of a second.

            “We’re free!” Fievel cheered.

            “What’s this all about, Jenn? What’ve you gotten yourself int—!” Jennifer ended the call without hesitation, cutting Archie off mid-sentence. She got what she needed; there was no need to prolong a boring conversation with a boring individual.

            “Oh, no! You’re free!” Tiger quivered. “How did you get free? Never mind. Doesn’t matter. I’m dead meat. Warren’s gonna fire me—and if I’m bein’ honest, I hope he does. I never liked him. And his music stinks!”

            “Does that mean you’ll help us?” asked Tyler, who was starting to like the tabby cat in the short time they got to know each other.

            “Help you?” Tiger said. “What can I do?”

            “For starters, you can get us into that thing,” Rania pointed to the Dalek chassis at the corner of the room.

            “That big pepper shaker?” Tiger labeled it. “Whatcha gonna do in there?”

            “A lot,” Rania said. “We’re not letting Warren get away with the damage to this world that the Archivist caused. With that Dalek chassis, we can get to that rally before the Maulers hurt the mice.”

            With Tiger’s assistance, Rania and her companions climbed into the Dalek casing through the top dome, which Tiger was big enough to open for them. Once inside, they were surrounded by an array of components and various control consoles—one of which Jennifer found rather amusing.

            “Well, I’ll be darn,” she said. “Am I seeing things, or does this Dalek have its own stereo system?” She fiddled with the console and came to an even bigger surprise: “A whole Donna Summer playlist, too?!”

            Rania took a glance at it and nodded. “Yeah, it’s kind of a long story. Right now, let’s just focus on powering this thing up and getting to that pier.”