"Gifts of the Gladiator" - Part Two

Part Two

            “¡Dios mío! What’re you?! Some kind of Christmas chupacabra?!”

            The Grinch barely comprehended what Carlos meant. “A cup-of-what? What did you call me?!” He gazed around at the rooftop he stood upon. “Better question: where’s my sled? And my dog, Max?” He then walked over to the edge and surveyed the neighborhood down below, taken aback by how devastated it appeared. “Wow. Definitely not in Whoville anymore.”

            Carlos couldn’t get over the Grinch’s alarming appearance. It was like a Halloween costume worn two months too late. And yet, it gave Carlos quite the solution to his current dilemma. “Hey, you, chupacabra,” he called to the Grinch. “How’d you like to get paid?”

            The Grinch’s curiosity piqued at the proposal. “How much we’re talkin’?”

            “Enough to make you a happy man…err…whatever…for life!”

            The Grinch earnestly considered. “What I gotta do?”

            Carlos joined him at the edge of the rooftop and pointed towards the one building on the devastated block that was virtually brand new. “All ya gotta do is spook out the folks in that building over there. I’ll take them away from their Christmas party and bring them on their roof, and you’ll scare them so bad, they’ll never wanna come back!”

            The Grinch grinned large and wide over Carlos’s devilish plan. “I like it,” he told him, “especially the part where we ruin their Christmas!”

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            The Christmas Eve party in Frank’s Café was in full-swing. It was the happiest that the leftover tenants had been in a long time, and all it took was a little “miracle” that Lindy brought to their bleak lives, with a little help from her “friends.” And while Lindy had lots of fun with her new friends, she was compelled to return to her TARDIS on the apartment rooftop and check on those other friends of hers.

            Her departure from the party didn’t go unnoticed by Harry Noble, who was the only one to have seen her leaving. Enquiringly, he followed her, keeping himself at a distance far enough to avoid being seen yet close enough to keep up with the young Australian woman. All those spy movies he spent hours watching really paid off. But none of those movies prepared him for what he followed Lindy to on the roof: a tall, black rectangular alien solid of some kind. A door had opened on what Harry assumed to be its front side, revealing an inside that was endlessly (and impossibly) bigger and roomier than its outside.

            Lindy walked right through the door, which might as well have been a portal to another dimension. Harry continued following her inside, stepping into a giant room that was like the inside of a spaceship. “Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore,” Harry muttered to himself (his mental disability made him quote from the programs he watched, which was the only way he communicated).

            “Mr. Noble?” he heard Lindy address him, appearing from one end of the large, ultramodern room. She unintentionally frightened him. He ever-so-slightly backed from her as she tried to approach. Noting his fear, she peaceably raised her hands and assured him, “I’m not going to hurt you, Mr. Noble. You’re more than welcomed here in my TARDIS – short for ‘Time And Relative Dimensions In Space’.”

            Harry again looked around at the alien interior design, from the control console at the center to the large viewscreen directly across from it. “You’ve just crossed over into the Twilight Zone,” he said of this stunning discovery.

            Lindy chuckled at the reference. “Well…not quite, Mr. Noble. That’s a completely different place…that I may have been to, once or twice.” She took one of Harry’s big, burly hands and led him further into her ship. “I’m so glad you’re here. You can witness with me the most beautiful miracle ever.” She brought Harry to a room that resembled a workshop where he was surprised to see two small, saucer-like alien beings sitting atop a worktable. “Harry, these are my friends: the Fix-Its,” Lindy introduced. “And they’re about to be parents.”

            Sure enough, the “Mother” Fix-It was being tended to by the “Father” one until the minute she was ready to give birth. The process was a bit chaotic and involved sparks and explosions of light. The “Mother” Fix-It hovered a few feet off the worktable, rattling violently. Three tiny ships then fell out from a port within her undercarriage – her three newborns. Two of them flickered with life straightaway, hopping about the worktable on two small legs, while the third didn’t move at all.

            “Awww,” Lindy lamented as she scooped the tiny stillborn in her hands. “This little one’s still sleeping.”

            “Batteries not included,” Harry sadly parroted a common advertisement phrase.

            “It’s alright, Mr. Noble,” Lindy reassured with a smile, “because we bring good things to life.”

            She proceeded in aiming the tip of her sonic screwdriver at the tiny stillborn and gave a few short pulses from it. It was just the pick-me-up that the third Fix-It newborn needed to spring to life right in the palm of Lindy’s hand, much to her and Harry’s delight.

            The happy moment was suddenly disrupted by a voice boasting just outside Lindy’s TARDIS. She and Harry stepped out to see a green-furred man in a rough-and-ready Santa suit repeating in various tones, “I’ve come to steal your Christmas!”

            “Whose Christmas?” Lindy asked, only to realize thereafter that this man was none other than the Grinch of Whoville. “What’re you doing here?”

            “Well, I…uh…I’m…” The Grinch stammered on an explanation, only to refuse on it and counter Lindy’s inquiry. “What’re you doing here?”

            Lindy circled around the Grinch, curiously examining him.

            “It’s pretty obvious that you’ve gotten here through one of the rifts,” she said.

            “Would you stop…whatever it is that you’re doing?!” The Grinch demanded, prompting Lindy to discontinue analyzing him. “If you must know why I’m here, I’m here to ruin Christmas for the people in this building – me and my new friend, Carlito.”

            “You mean Carlos?” Lindy corrected him.

            “Yeah, something like that,” the Grinch passively verified.

            This news alarmed Harry, but Lindy remained calm. “I don’t believe your plan’s gonna go the way you think, Mr. Grinch.”

            “Is that so?” the Grinch contested. “And what makes you so sure?”

            “Another Christmas miracle,” Lindy simply replied.

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            Dollar signs floated all across Carlos’s line of vision. He already imagined himself walking into Lacey’s office and Lacey himself handing over the million-dollar paycheck for a job well done. The Grinch was at his position on the roof of the renovated building, leaving Carlos to set their scheme in motion.

            He was about to enter Frank’s Café to “warn” the Rileys and their fellow tenants of the “creature” he saw on the roof of their apartment. But then a greasy-looking man in a cheap suit approached him and asked, “You’re Carlos, right?”

            Carlos warily gazed up and down at the man. He was lugging a suitcase in one hand. “Who are you?” Carlos questioned him. “Did Lacey hire you? That ain’t right, man! I’m getting the job done right now! So you can go and tell him…” He paused just as soon as he whiffed what could’ve only been gasoline from the man’s suitcase. “Hey, what you got in there, man?”

            “Enough to burn this whole place to the ground,” the man said.

            Carlos’s chocolate brown eyes flared in furious realization. “You’re an arsonist! He didn’t trust me with this job, so he goes and hires an arsonist?!”

            “Don’t take it so personal, kid,” the arsonist mocked him. “Ya just didn’t have what it took.” That comment earned him a swift and unanticipated punch to the face by Carlos. It was vigorous enough to send the arsonist falling into a collection of steel garbage cans nearby. His suitcase fell to the ground, popping open and spilling all of its contents out all over the sidewalk – including the gasoline Carlos smelled.

            The ruckus that the two men stirred attracted the attention of the entire neighborhood and even the tenants inside the very building they fought over. Mason, Marisa, and the Rileys rushed outside to find Carlos threateningly standing over the arsonist he clocked.

            “What is going on here?” Frank inquired.

            Mason discovered the spilled contents of the arsonist’s suitcase, recognizing who the man was and his purpose for being at their apartment. “He was going to burn our place up – and with us inside!” Mason went right away in going back inside and calling the police, making sure to note Lacey’s involvement in it. Meanwhile, Marisa and Frank held the arsonist at bay; Frank pinned him down with a broom handle.

            Faye ecstatically hugged Carlos. “You saved us, Bobby,” she told him, still confusing him for her departed son. “You’re a hero!”

            Carlos hadn’t predicted this turn of events. He initially set out to scare away the Rileys and their fellow tenants. Now he was just thankful to have kept them from suffering a horrible fate. And that feeling was worth more than any money that sleaze-ball Lacey would’ve given him. He’s gonna need it to bail himself out of prison!

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            “Christmas miracles? Bleh!” the Grinch scoffed. “What a load of…!”

            As ready as he was to contend with Lindy’s claim, he was interrupted by flashes of blue and red lights that he sensed at the corner of his eye. Glimpsing over the edge of the rooftop, he saw a police car that pulled up in front of Frank’s Café. A man that the Grinch thought at first was Carlos was loaded into the back in handcuffs. In fact, Carlos was leading the massive crowd of people (including those he and the Grinch were supposed to have been scaring out of the building) in a Christmas carol.

            The scene brought a warm smile to the faces of Lindy and Harry. “Well, would you look at that – it’s another Christmas miracle,” Lindy cunningly observed.

            The Grinch was flabbergasted. “B-B-But…I don’t understand! We had such a great Christmas-ruining plan! It was foolproof! It was ingenious and it would’ve made both of us rich beyond our wildest dreams! Why would he throw it all away like that for Christmas of all things?!”

            “Because Christmas isn’t just ribbons, tags, packages, boxes, or bags,” Lindy told the Grinch. “Christmas doesn’t come from money or even a store.”

            “Christmas means a little bit more,” Harry finished. He knew the story, too.

            Hands on his hips, the Grinch dismissed the sentiment, “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard!”

            Amused by his rejection of his own logic, Lindy reflected, “You’re certainly different from the other Grinches I’ve met.”

            The Grinch’s ears (if he had them) prickled from her remark.

            “Other Grinches?” he echoed specifically those words, a look of wonder masking his furry green face. “You’ve actually met other Grinches? M-My whole life…I thought there was no one else like me.”

            Discerning the warmth swelling inside him, which may or may not have encompassed a small heart that grew three sizes, Lindy invited the Grinch, “Why don’t you come with me in my TARDIS and I’ll introduce you to them. It’ll be my Christmas gift to you.”

            And so, the Grinch accepted the Gladiator’s invite. Even Harry Noble joined the two strangers from beyond his world, all of them entering the Type-Z TARDIS, leaving the dimension, and entering the infinite DC for a new journey.

"Gifts of the Gladiator" - Part One

Part One

            VWOORP! VWOORP! VWOORP!

            The Type-Z TARDIS, piloted by the Time Lord known multi-universally as the “Gladiator of Gallifrey,” dematerialized atop the roof of a building in the east side of Manhattan. The Gladiator, whose Gallifreyan birth name was “Neas,” stepped out of her module in her latest eighth incarnation: an athletic, tall blond Australian, physically in her early forties. Neas christened this incarnation with the name of “Lindy.” She was almost never without a warm smile on her attractive face.

            Yet that smile faded a little as she observed how derelict the rooftop she landed on was. The district itself wasn’t as welcoming. Most of the neighboring residences were either in worse shape or completely torn down. The mechanical rumblings of construction machines built for demolition, including bulldozers and cranes hauling wrecking balls, ran across the mountains of rubble.

            In between the rumblings, Lindy heard commotion down below. Looking over the edge, she spotted a group of hoodlums tossing an old man out through the front entrance of a café interconnected with the building’s first floor. By the faded neon sign, Lindy saw its name to be “Frank’s Café,” and Frank must’ve been the old man being hassled.

            As soon as she noticed one of the hoodlums walking back into the café to vandalize it, Lindy moved into action. She exited the rooftop, rushing down several flights of stairs and, along the way, seeing other damages that had been done to other areas of the building. When she made it to the café, the hoodlums were gone, leaving the café in shambles.

            Frank walked in, desolate and humiliated.

            “Sir, are you alright?” Lindy asked him.

            He hardly even noticed the towering Australian blonde standing there. “No, I’m not alright!” he snapped at her. Lindy found his anger justifiable. “I’ll never be alright. Not as long as Lacey keeps sendin’ in his goons to run us out.” He kicked at a banged-up toaster on the floor. “What a way to spend Christmas.”

            Hearing what time of the year she arrived in surprised Lindy. “It’s Christmas? I didn’t see any decorations anywhere.”

            “Not much reason to celebrate with all this goin’ on,” Frank gestured to the construction happening right outside. “What’s even the point? Ain’t got any kids runnin’ around here…just a bunch of hopeless souls.”

            As Frank sulked, Lindy detected someone at the corner of her eye. It was an elderly woman who looked just as old as Frank. Despite the dismal state of the café she walked into, she beamed once she saw Lindy. “Oh, you must be the new girl our Bobby’s been dating,” she said of Lindy, who couldn’t help but to feel a little confused.

            “Faye,” Frank addressed the elderly woman, who Lindy assumed to be his wife. “She isn’t Bobby’s girlfriend. She’s…” He paused just as he realized about Lindy, “Who are you, young lady? Are you one of the tenants?”

            Lindy loved it when the cover-up supplied itself. “Yes…yes, I am.”

            “Well, I don’t suppose you’ll be stayin’ with us much longer,” Frank wretchedly presumed. “Most of everybody else has moved out or been forced out by Lacey and his lackey, Carlos.”

            “Was this ‘Carlos’ the one who did all of this to your café?” Lindy motioned over the hoodlum’s handiwork.

            Frank confirmed this with a gentle nod. “I don’t even know what to do anymore.”

            Faye patted one side of her husband’s face. “You’ll think of something, Frank. I know you always do. Bobby knows it, too.” Her reference to “Bobby” only made Frank more depressed as she walked out of the café.

            Taking notice, Lindy deduced, “Bobby’s your son?”

            “Our dead son,” Frank emphasized. Exhausted physically and emotionally, he sat himself down at one of the booths. “Killed in car accident, fifteen years ago…he would’ve been thirty-six last week.”

            “And your wife, Faye, hasn’t been able to accept that reality.”

            Frank slowly shook his head. His sad, weary eyes looked to the heavens, and he pleaded, “Please…somebody…help us.”

            Lindy’s hearts sank for the poor old man. He was begging…no, he was praying for a miracle. And she was going to give him one.

            Later, she went back to her TARDIS on the roof. There, she consulted with her latest two companions – small, sentient extraterrestrial spaceships (one male, one female) that she called “The Fix-Its,” on account of their special gift of repairing anything in less than a microsecond.

            She filled them in on the situation with Frank and the other residents of the building, until she reached the part where she shared her plan. “We’re gonna give all of them the Christmas miracle they deserve,” she declared. “And it’s gonna be so big, the whole city’s gonna know about it!”

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            The next morning, which just happened to have been Christmas Eve, Frank awoke to a scent of freshness in the air rather than the usual mold and mothballs that had always sent him in a coughing fit at the middle of the night. Faye woke up before he did, and he heard her outside, conversing with the few other tenants.

            As he walked through their home, he noticed how everything looked repainted, reorganized, refreshed, and refurbished. The faded color of the walls and door frames received a new coat of paint and a new polish. These renovations weren’t just limited to Frank and Faye’s apartment; they spread throughout the entire building.

            The floor tiles that Harry Noble, a brain-damaged ex-boxer and the landlord, painstakingly worked on had been all done for him, with fresh new ones instead of the discolored and rusted ones he kept in a jar.

            To top it all off, various and extravagant Christmas decorations were strung up.

            “Did someone hire a redecorator and didn’t tell us?” asked Marisa Esteval, an expectant single mother. “I didn’t know we could afford one.”

            “We can’t,” Frank told her.

            “Guys!” Mason Baylor, a young artist who lived a few floors above Frank and Faye, rushed in with great urgency. “You’ve gotta see what it looks like from the outside!” He led them right outside to get a look at the restored exterior of their apartment complex, looking exactly the way Frank and Faye remembered it decades ago. It stood out like a sore thumb from the rest of the demolished neighborhood.

            When Frank saw the brand new neon sign of his café, it prompted him and the other tenants to examine that section of the building as well. Walking inside, they found Lindy sitting barefoot on the counter while sipping on some type of healthy beverage. “Morning, everyone,” she greeted, apparently oblivious to the miracle that had come over their building. “Anyone fancy a fresh cuppa celery juice?”

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            The entire city of New York caught wind of the “Miracle on 7th Avenue,” as several news stations and newspapers were calling it. It eventually reached the eyes and ears of Lacey, the property developer so bent on demolishing the once-diluted apartment complex. He made a call to Carlos, belittling him on failing at his one job.

            “I don’t know what happened, Mr. Lacey,” Carlos pathetically excused. “I had that place turned into Swiss cheese yesterday. I don’t know how they got the whole building fixed overnight!”

            “I don’t care how they did it! My plans for that district remain unchanged!” Lacey made clear to him. “I want them out of that building before Christmas morning! You hear me?!”

            Carlos didn’t see any point. The building was restored to its original condition, which meant there were no longer any grounds for it to be demolished. But he knew better than to disobey a powerful man like Lacey. So, with no other choice, he staked out in an abandoned building across the street and spent all day contemplating while keeping watch over the activity within the restored apartment complex through a pair of binoculars.

            By that evening, Carlos sat in the virtually skeletal structure of the building, freezing his butt off from the chilly winds that blew through the busted windows and crumbled walls. Meanwhile, there was a Christmas party the Riley couple was throwing in Frank’s Café that Carlos wished he could be a part of. And yet, there he was, wallowing in the cold without a single plan for putting those people out on the street.

            Just as he considered abandoning his mission…

            THUMP!

            He heard heavy movement on the roof. Curiosity overwhelming him, he went there and was baffled to find some kind of man-sized creature with green fur, wearing a makeshift Santa costume.

            As if Carlos’s night couldn’t have gotten any more complicated.

"Breach on the Pacific Rim" - Part Seven

Part Seven

            Neas and Lauren had to act fast in getting Pentecost’s bomb on board the Type-Z without him or anyone else knowing. It felt wrong to work behind the marshal’s back, after they worked so hard in getting back in his good graces. But this was for the good of the brave men and women of the Shatterdome.

            Working incognito, with help from Newton and a heavily reluctant Hermann, they managed to get the bomb to the T.A.R.D.I.S. before it could have been loaded into one of the last remaining Jaegers, Gypsy and Eureka.

            Unfortunately, Pentecost caught on to their operation.

            Confronting the Time Lords and the two scientists near the T.A.R.D.I.S. with Raleigh and Mako, Pentecost demandingly inquired, “What is it you think you’re doing with that bomb?”

            Neas had no other choice. “Your plan’s not going to work, Marshal. Pop and I drifted with the Kaiju brain and saw that only things foreign to this world, like a Kaiju or our T.A.R.D.I.S., can enter through the breach. The bomb’s just going to deflect, and the mission will fail.”

            “Which is why we’re taking it to the Kaiju’s world ourselves,” Lauren said. “We won’t let anyone sacrifice their lives, when we have the technology to get the job done ourselves.”

            “But that’s not your call to make,” Raleigh rebutted.

            “Mister Becket’s right,” Pentecost acknowledged. “We decide who’s to—”

            The debate was interrupted by the sound an incoming alert from Tendo Choi, regarding the emergence of three Kaiju – the Triple Event that Lauren and Hermann predicted. And to make matters more complicated, one of the Kaiju was a Category V, the first of its kind they have ever faced.

            “There’s no better way to do this, Marshal,” Neas said. “We’ve got one shot, and we’re your only chance at success.”

            Heeding the Time Lord’s words, Pentecost made the call…

            “We’ll buy you some time holding them off.”

            “We?” A disconcerted Mako noted his diction. “You are going to fight with us?”

            “Eureka needs another Jaeger pilot,” Pentecost told her. “And Herc’s injured.”

            “But you will die,” Mako pleaded.

            “If I do nothing, we all die.”

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            Moments later, Gipsy and Eureka were deployed, with the three Kaiju – Scunner, Raiju, and Slattern – waiting for them at the middle of the Pacific. The two Jaegers were prepared for a three-on-two score until the arrival of Godzilla made it an even three-on-three.

            “This is it, people,” Pentecost roared. “This is the day we cancel the apocalypse!”

            Gipsy and Eureka grappled with the Category IV’s, Scunner and Raiju.

            Godzilla had Slattern to himself; their contest created tidal waves between every blow traded.

            As the fight above the surface ensued, the breach pulsated underwater.

            Neas’s T.A.R.D.I.S. materialized in the Anteverse, the home world of the Kaiju and their creators, the Precursors.

            Wearing modified exploration suits to work against the thick underwater environment, Neas and Lauren stepped out to the mortifying surroundings that included several monstrous Kaiju of varying sizes swarming around.

            “We’re sticking out like a sore thumb down here,” Neas noted. “Every move we make in setting up this bomb is just going to draw their attention!”

            “Then you get going, while I buy you some time,” Lauren suggested.

            “You buying me time, Pentecost and Raleigh buying us time…if anyone else buys any more time, there’s not gonna be enough I.O.U.’s to go around,” Neas jested while Lauren carried on with her task.

            She controlled the path of the pursuing Kaiju through the jet propulsion of her suit.

            Meanwhile, Neas overrode the bomb’s protocols with his sonic screwdriver, setting it to go off at one minute.

            “Pop, it’s armed!” Neas called. “Let’s get our butts out of here!”

            Lauren redirected her path, soaring right back to Neas.

            They retreated into the T.A.R.D.I.S. before it dematerialized from the Anteverse.

            The bomb, reaching the final count of zero, detonated.

            In seconds, the alien forces of the Kaiju and Precursors were decimated, and the breach was ultimately sealed off.

            On the surface, the remaining Kaiju fell to the combined forces of Gipsy Danger, Striker Eureka, and Godzilla.

            Humankind had won, with a little Gallifreyan support.

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            “Everybody lives, Pop,” Neas beamed, shortly upon materializing the T.A.R.D.I.S. back in the Shatterdome. “Just as it should always be!”

            Lauren kissed him on the cheek, a reward for his bravery in the ordeal.

            In the midst of the celebratory crowd, they caught sight of a melancholic Pentecost, still dressed in his Jaeger body armor, standing aside from the festivities. “Hey, Marshal,” Neas called to him. “What’s the matter? We won, didn’t we?”

            Pentecost mustered a faint smile. “Yes, we did. Unfortunately, my personal battle will have its end sooner than I wanted.”

            Lauren sulked. “Your radiation poisoning,” she inferred. “Mako told us about it.”

            “Years of wars catching up with me,” Pentecost lamented, “and this last one just gave me one more day to live. To be honest, when I was out there, I thought for sure I would have died in one final fight. Your efforts, and even Godzilla’s, gave me what little of a second chance I have.”

            In his grief, he felt a strong pinch at the left side of his neck.

            “Ah! What the…?!”

            He saw it was Neas, injecting him with a foreign-looking syringe that he questioned where the Time Lord had it kept on his exploration suit…and for what purpose.

            “What did you give me?” He suspiciously asked.

            “A sedative we concocted that’ll wholly diminish your radiation sickness within an hour,” Neas enlightened. “That should give you enough years to spend with Mako and whatever grandchildren she and Raleigh will have.” He gestured to where the two Jaeger heroes kissed, emphasizing his point.

            It was too good to be true for Pentecost, but he could feel the cells in his body already regenerating, expelling the radiation.

            “Thank you, Mister Neas,” the immensely grateful marshal said. “But, if I’m gonna have to live to see Mister Becket and Mako have grandchildren of their own, you can give me back that radiation.”

            Neas and Lauren chuckled at the marshal’s lighthearted jest.

            It seemed the serum did more than give him back his life; it put more life in him.

            Saying their goodbyes, Neas and Lauren – free of the breach that hindered their initial departure – returned back into the infinite dimensional corridor.

            Following the Time Lords’ departure, the Shatterdome crew stepped out onto the helipad, watching as the true hero in their victory against the Kaiju race – Godzilla – bid its own farewell in the form of a rigorous screech, prior to returning to the sea.

            “The one Kaiju that saved us from the Kaiju,” Newt reflected.

            “Yes,” Hermann agreed with his colleague. “Who would’ve imagined it? Other than you, of course.”

            “Think we’ll ever need him again, Marshal?” Raleigh queried.

            “I’m not even sure where he came from, Mister Becket,” Pentecost said. “What I do know is that anything is possible in this world we live.”

NEXT WEEK!