© 2005 Mike Blake (Monisawa),  Jeremy Blake (www.jerbl.com);  All rights and privileges reserved.
 _____________________________________________________________________________________________

Team Claw in Securing the Sewer

Nemo anxiously looked up and down the street to assure himself that no one was looking, confirming that no one was, he pressed his paw against the front of the air conditioner.  It rotated once, then clicked up into place to reveal a communication device.  He glanced at the screen, sure enough, a message was waiting for him from HQ.  Odd, he thought, because usually they could wait long enough for him to receive messages in the control room.  Whenever they felt that it was important enough, they paged his com unit that had been embedded into his tail.  Odd feeling indeed having his tail go off, especially when he was curled up and asleep with his tail against his nose.  Odd feeling.  He clicked on the message, and waited for it to be pulled from the HQ satellite, but as soon as he read it, he had wished that he had checked it all that much earlier.  "He Knows Your Location," it said, and he knew too well who the "He" was.  Viktor had tracked them back to the house somehow after their last mission.  Horrified at the possibility of having to relocate he glanced at the sun.  He still had one hour of daylight, and everyone had to wait till night fall before the could act.  He glanced around as he clicked the air conditioner unit back to normal, as his eyes continued the patrol, he met another pair of eyes casually staring back at him from behind a bush.  "Not again!" he mumbled, as the all but not familiar voice cut through the branches, "How could you let him find out?"  "I'm not sure" he fired back, "Try to remember that we are in this together though."  "I've been here too long to be forced to relocate" came the retort as she lifted herself from her curled position and walked over to him, keeping her glare as icy as possible.  "Ms. Kitty, I realize that this is very unfortunate, but you know that it is standard procedure to wait until nightfall before I can even so much as scan for him or for the device that he used," replied Nemo as respectfully as he could without getting angry.  He knew the seriousness of the situation, he didn't need an older cat to tell him about reality.  His mind continued to think of solutions while Ms. Kitty continued to rail on him about relocation.  He knew all about how she had been relocated the first time, that was why she was here.  Her parents had been discovered by Viktor's Dad, but that was back before HQ, that was before they were organized, that was before they could get away.  He smiled a little, as he was thankful that Viktor hadn't immediately inherited the ruthless behavior of his father right away.  Unfortunately Ms. Kitty also saw the smile, and was well aware that she was being ignored,  she got really close to him and hissed in his face, "It would be easy for you to relocate now, but I don't ever want it to happen again, understand?"  She grew sad for a minute, "I really miss my parents."  Caught off guard by the confession he replied, "I'm sorry about your parents."  She looked at him for a moment, with sad eyes, and then flipped back into her icy as ever mode, "You better do something about it right now, get in there and find out where he is and what he is doing, he won't wait for nightfall, you should know that."  Nemo suddenly realized that she was absolutely right, even with the added cover of nightfall, Viktor most assuredly wouldn't do something nice like that and wait.  He suddenly hit on it, Life Form Number 8 was coming home from a friend's house, he whipped around the house up to the front door and leapt up to the bottom of the door.  Number 8 walked right up the stairs and opened the door, letting him go in first.  Perfect, now the hard part was to get into the Control Room.  One of the Life Forms was occupying the main entrance, but since the other side was still under construction, he raced through the Master Bedroom and into the bathroom, there was a lot at stake here, and he didn't want to let anybody down.  He pawed the board and it clicked out to let him in, he flipped on the scanner and did a normal deep scan of the house.  Nothing.  Odd, it should have picked up something.  He flipped it to Advanced Deep Scan, still nothing.  He maxed out the dial and hit scan again.  Finally it got something, an RFID tag downstairs in the storage closet under the cage that Tsuki and Yoru called home.  Old technology, of course, why hadn't he thought of that, but what could he possibly want to use one of those for?  Of course!  Because it didn't transmit anything, which would have been picked up sooner, the Control Room would have instantly alerted him to anything transmitting out, an RFID tag needed something to transmit to it so that it could transmit out.  He widened the scan and sure enough, in the sewer line a couple of blocks off was the transmitter, moving slowly, but definitely coming.  Not much time to act.  His mind raced with what to do as he raced out of the room and down the stairs, at this point, what the Life Forms thought of him was unimportant, and surely they gave him some weird stares as he raced down the stairs.  He grabbed a Portable Analyzer that HQ had graciously sent him in the Matter Transporter and raced down stairs, Tsuki and Yoru saw him and knew something was up.  To the Life Forms, they didn't get along very well, at least that was what their assignment was to do.  Thankfully none of the LIfe Forms occupied the downstairs and Nemo hurriedly found the hot spot on the floor and pawed it.  It snapped and ground up, raising a two foot slab of concrete in which they had embedded a closet of sorts.  He held out the Portable Analyzer and it beeped over their new velcro shoes from the previous mission.  "Of course!" yelled Nemo, "it picked it up on our last mission."  Yoru, as lazy as he was, though always the first to pick up on things, asked "I guess we should have known that he was going to pull something, I mean come on, he was trying to blow us and the power plant sky high with all those bombs."  Nemo nodded at him and started thinking about what to do, Viktor was still a good distance off, so he quickly described the whole situation to Tsuki and Yoru as they listened intently.  They had no time to lose.  They all decided that getting the boots out of the house was probably the best thing, but Nemo didn't want to leave the boots anywhere as that would confirm their existence in the area.  Tsuki suggested that they duplicate the RFID tag a thousand times and then transport them to every house in the area.  Yoru just kinda looked at her like she was super dumb, but then the light bulb hit, and he agreed with her.  Nemo just looked at them both like that was impossible, but asked them to explain.  "Its quite simple really," said Yoru, "the Matter Transporter can be set with multiple destinations, that would effectively duplicate whatever it is transporting, it proved largely unsuccessful at cloning live beings, but I am sure that a physical object would survive."  "That will just have to do," Nemo replied, and he handed the boots to Tsuki who instantly had the RFID tag in her paw and handed it to Nemo.  He threw the boots back into the closet and raced to the Matter Transporter.  He glanced at the Destination Panel and collectively programmed the last one thousand destinations, threw the tag in and hit and watched it go.  He sincerely hoped that it would work, because he knew that it wouldn't be just him or Ms. Kitty to be relocated, they would all have to go.  He hadn't studied anything about the Psychological Effects on the Life Forms, but it had a severe impact on a cat's effectiveness at his/her assignments after a transfer.  Ms. Kitty had never been handed an assignment for that very reason.  She had been too old when the accident had happened, it was just too much for her.  He smiled again, a little ruefully, that incident had been the one that he had discovered just how much his uniform would take, thinking about it a bit more, he cringed, rehab had truly been a nightmare.  Before anybody could say "Cat Food" Nemo was back into the Control Room and monitoring the tags that had been sent out.  "Success!" Viktor was already following another tag's signal.  Watching him for a bit, he changed direction several times, apparently confounded at yet another tag's signal.  Nemo knew that Viktor had brought a rather limited device, as the sewer would not allow very much room at all, but he was thankful that it had turned out so well.  He shut the Screens down and turned everything on Auto and left.  It was time to finish his day outside.

Join us next time when Ms. Kitty finally gets her revenge, until then!