"The Return of Jack Slater" - Part Three

Part Three

            Everyone in the television studio was frozen in total fear, except for Jack, who was coherent and brave enough to take out his massive handgun and fire a few silver bullets into the werewolf. Regrettably, his shots missed their mark just as the werewolf lunged at him and proceeded to terrorize the studio, wrecking Elvira’s set and sending all of the crew fleeting in panic.

            In the confusion, Jack dropped his gun, which was left skidding across the floor. It eventually stopped at the feet of Mordecai, who retrieved it and was about to toss it back to Slater before Benson yelled, “Don’t, Mordecai! If you toss him that gun, you’re fired!”

            Benson’s trust of Jack waned ever since they met him.

            Only now it had boiled over with the cinematic action hero’s life in mortal danger, the werewolf inching dangerously close to him.

            Mordecai wanted to do the right thing. It was crazy of Benson to just let Jack die.

            Fortunately, it wasn’t Jack’s day to die.

            Someone fired a few tranquilizer darts into the werewolf, knocking it out. As it turned out, that “someone” was Shel, emerging from her TARDIS with the rifle that she used to save every soul in the studio, specifically Jack.

            Slater, on the other hand, was beyond upset with Benson. He delivered a punch across the park manager’s glass dome powerful enough to rattle the gumballs inside. “What’s the matter with you?!” he roared to Benson.

            “Whoa, whoa!” Shel stepped in between them. “What’s going on?!”

            “This fool nearly got me killed!” Slater accused Benson. “He kept his friend from giving me back my gun when that werewolf was just about to have me for dinner!”

            Shel looked on Benson with judging eyes. “Is that true, Benson?”

            “Well, I…the thing is that…I…” Benson stammered, unable to give reason to his actions, which seemed heartless now that they were exposed in front of everyone – Slater, Mordecai, Rigby, Elvira, and especially Shel.

            “Please explain to me why you thought it was smart to put Jack’s life in danger!” Shel demanded of him, her tone – usually sweet and gentle – increasingly hostile.

            Benson still wasn’t sure what to say, but the intense glare Jack gave him sparked the defiance back in him to tell Shel, “I have my reasons.” He almost couldn’t believe he told her that after the fact.

            The hurt expressed in Shel’s gorgeous face only made it worse. “Well,” she said, close to a whisper, “I see now that I can no longer have you with me in my journeys, if I can’t trust you enough to be honest with me about your actions.” She addressed him like a mother disappointed with her child. Driving this analogy further, she pointed to the TARDIS and ordered Benson, “Go back into the ship with Mordecai and Rigby.”

            “Us?!” Rigby defensively exclaimed. “What did we do?!”

            “Don’t think I’ve forgotten who sent my TARDIS careening out of control,” she told the raccoon. “As far as I’m concerned, all three of you are a hazard to our mission! And I will send you back home, once we’ve taken care of the leak!”

            Benson, Mordecai, and Rigby guiltily returned inside Shel’s TARDIS.

            In the meantime, the werewolf had reverted back into a conscious (albeit naked) human male. As captivating as it was for her to see him nude, Elvira supplied him with the appropriate clothes she could find from the costume rack.

            They discovered his name to be David Kessler.

            “What do you last remember before coming here, David?” Shel asked him.

            Kessler kept his composure as he explained, “I was in my girlfriend’s flat in London, bored out of my mind. Then I got hit with this shooting pain all over my body. Next thing I know…I’m here with you guys.” He gazed around at his new surroundings. “Where is here, by the way?”

            “Los Angeles,” Elvira said.

            David’s face ignited with surprise. “I’m back in America?!”

            “One of them, at least,” Shel specified. “I’m afraid you’ve been separated from your dimension, David. But don’t worry. I’ll have you cured of your werewolf curse and sent back home, as soon as we’ve found the other TARDIS, which I believe is the source of the leak we’ve been looking for.”

            “Leak? What leak?” Elvira inquired. “You talkin’ about a busted pipe or some dude takin’ a whiz?”

            Shel could no longer stomach Elvira’s droll attitude. “It’s no concern of yours.”

            “I beg to differ, honey,” Elvira deflected. “I think I got involved the second I was nearly ripped apart by a werewolf.” She subsequently told David, “No offense, darlin’.”

            “None taken,” Kessler remarked in a monotone.

            As much as she hated to admit it, Shel knew Elvira had a point and more than deserved a spot in the TARDIS. Kessler and his condition was something straight out of a horror movie, which Elvira had an expertise in. If they were to encounter any more horror icons leaked from their dimensions, like Frankenstein or the Creature of the Black Lagoon, the travelers would need to know how to fight them off.

------------------

            As the team was en route to the dimension where the other Type-Z TARDIS was headed, following its random dematerialization before David’s emergence, Benson sat in the kitchen with Mordecai, Rigby, Elvira, and Kessler. The guilt of his actions back in the television studio weighed heavily on him.

            “Shel will never trust me again,” he lamented.

            “She’ll never want to see you again,” Rigby indicated. Mordecai would’ve slugged him across the arm for that remark if it weren’t so true.

            “Oh, buck up, buttercup,” Elvira told Benson while swigging on a bottle of Coke she got out of the refrigerator (she surprisingly knew her way around Shel’s TARDIS). After a quick belch, she continued, “Shel’s a forgiving kind of gal. She’ll move on from your little mishap.”

            Her surety of the situation intrigued Rigby. “How would you know that? You’ve only just met Shel.”

            Before Elvira could explain, the Cloister Bell suddenly rang.

            Mordecai, Rigby, and Benson remembered what Shel once said about it being a sign of trouble. Together with Elvira and David, they rushed back to the console room. There, to their shock, they found Jack carrying the lifeless body of Shel in his arms. In front of him was a portal generated by his magic ticket.

            “Jack!” Mordecai called out. “What’re you doing?!”

            Slater solemnly glanced back at them, not saying a word, and stepped through the portal. It closed afterwards, leaving Benson, Mordecai, Rigby, Elvira, and David standing in the console room, stunned and baffled by the actions of Jack Slater.

"The Return of Jack Slater" - Part Two

Part Two

            Benson’s hypercritical gaze never once diverted from Shel’s so-called friend, Jack Slater, from the second he blasted his way into their lives. Even now, he kept close watch over him as he and Shel stood over the console platform, using the TARDIS computer to track down the source of the anomalies.

            “So how did you guys meet each other?” Mordecai asked (and Benson was glad that he did).

            “Oh, it’s a long and complicated story,” Shel nonchalantly replied.

            “We got time,” Benson remarked with a tone that was way harsher than he intended for it to be.

            Shel and Jack looked away from the console and to the Park crew. “Well,” she began, “I was a different woman at the time. I met Jack in his world while visiting there with my old friends Greg, Wirt, and Toby. By that time, he had already known about his reality being completely fiction.”

            “Fiction?” Rigby repeated. “You mean like from a story?”

            “More like a movie,” Slater reiterated.

            “You see, Jack’s from a cinematic world,” Shel explained. “Everything there follows every movie cliché you can think of. They even have a cartoon characters that…” Before she could finish on the details, the TARDIS console beeped, notifying Shel that it had updates on the trace of the anomalies. “It’s picked up on dozens of rifts in at least a hundred worlds, a few of which I’ve been to…including the Pacific Rim! That’d explain why Godzilla ended up there!”

            “What does all of it mean?” Mordecai inquired.

            “It means that what I initially believed about the rifts – that they were a random occurrence – isn’t entirely true,” Shel said. “I mean, they are still technically random, but each of them is being generated by a transdimensional leak inside one of the worlds.”

            “Which one?” Rigby asked.

            “That’s exactly what I’m about to find out,” Shel declared, inputting information through the TARDIS computer. Less than a second thereafter, she received feedback. “Got it! It’s inside a television station in one of the Los Angeleses.”

            With this new lead, she dematerialized her TARDIS out of the dimensional corridor and to the Los Angeles television station. She and her companions stepped out into an area filled with all the necessary filming equipment and some props standing near the wall. One of them caught Shel’s interest right away: a tall black rectangular solid.

            “Wait, isn’t that your TARDIS?” Mordecai noticed the resemblance also. “Or could it be a stage prop?”

            “When you travel between parallel worlds like I do, one thing you can count on is a coincidence,” Shel told Mordecai. “But there’s only one way to be sure.”

            Shel went right to the module and scanned it with her sonic screwdriver.

            In the inaudible atmosphere, the whirr of the Gallifreyan tool was louder than usual. It soon followed with a shushing noise, coming from a man who – by the flashy outfit he wore – could have only been the director.

            They hadn’t realized that they arrived during the filming a local program.

            While Shel kept on with her probing of the lookalike of her Type-Z TARDIS, Mordecai and Rigby’s focus centered on the live show being filmed. The stage for it was modeled after a haunted house with a red Victorian chaise longue right in the middle of it. Resting on the chaise longue was a busty, pale-skinned woman wearing heavy makeup and a gothic, cleavage-enhancing black gown.

            “Dude, it’s Elvira,” Rigby excitedly exclaimed.

            “It can’t be,” Mordecai denied. “The Movie Macabre only airs in our world.”

            “It airs in mine, too,” Jack said.

            Their chattering once again drew the ire of the director, just as Elvira sounded off her broadcast with her signature closing line: “Unpleasant dreams, my darlings.”

            “Cut!” The director screamed, his frustration evident in his tone. He then turned to Shel and her friends, pointing to a blinking red light above the stage door. “When that light is on, you are to be as quiet as a mouse! Is that clear?!”

            “Oh, chill out, D.K.,” said Elvira as she got off the chaise longue. “It ain’t like we’re shootin’ Masterpiece Theatre.” Her remark was the last straw for the stressed-out director of her own show, prompting him to storm off.

            Mordecai and Rigby were awestruck in the presence of the Mistress of the Dark.

            “Would you sign my chest?!” Rigby blurted without thinking.

            “I’ll sign yours, if you sign mine, hon,” Elvira said with a flirtatious wink that sent the raccoon collapsing into Mordecai’s arms. She looked past the two characters and towards Shel, who was less than amused by Elvira’s attention-grabbing, still occupied with scanning the other Type-Z TARDIS in the studio. “Whatcha doin’ over there?”

            Shel tried her best to brush Elvira off as politely as she could. “I’m scanning.”

            “Scanning, eh?” Elvira uttered, waltzing over to Shel and snatching her sonic screwdriver right out of her grips. “What is this thing? Ya know, ya really shouldn’t be wavin’ this thing around. There could be kids here, for cryin’ out loud!”

            “Give that back!” Shel snapped, quickly losing patience with the vampish valley girl. “My friends and I are in the middle of an important investigation that could save countless universes.”

            Elvira scoffed. “That’s what they all say.”

            Suddenly, the other Type-Z TARDIS hummed loud enough for everyone in the studio to hear. It then throbbed, emitting flashes of colors. This activity went on for a minute before it vanished right in front of Shel and the others.

            “That can’t be good,” she gasped.

            The screams of a woman drew their attention to another area of the studio.

            Not a soul moved when they discovered a massive werewolf that had manifested out of nowhere.

"The Return of Jack Slater" - Part One

Part One

            “RIGBY!!”

            “Hey, you can’t fire me, if we’re not in our dimension, Benson!”

            “I think that’s the least of our concerns!”

            Shel had just met Mordecai, Rigby, and Benson – three characters from a place not-so-subtly called “The Park” that she saved from a Terminator controlled by Cybermen. Even before then, they seemed to have known her already. The name of this new body she inherited via regeneration, “Shel,” was one that she adopted only because it was what Mordecai, Rigby, and Benson referred it by.

            And now, due to the carelessness of the raccoon named Rigby, the four of them were uncontrollably careening down the infinite dimensional corridor. The takeoff was unanticipated, and because so, Shel and her new companions were juggled all around the console room like dice in a cup.

            Shel managed to end the painful experience by clasping the railing that bordered the console platform and propelling herself towards the control console itself. She then grabbed the stabilization lever. Utilizing the literal gravity of her situation, she yanked the lever as she was tossed over the control console.

            In the heartbeat of a second, the entire console room stilled, leaving Shel and the boys thudding to the floor.

            “Well, that hurt!” Rigby griped, right before Mordecai added insult to injury by punching him in the arm. “Ow! That hurt even worst!”

            “This is all your fault, dude!” Mordecai condemned his best friend.

            “How was I supposed to know what any of these buttons and doodads are supposed to do?!” Rigby argued.

            As the two bickered, Shel used the controls to dematerialize her TARDIS out of the infinite dimensional corridor. Seeing her do so, Benson asked her, “Are we still in our dimension?”

            Shel shrugged. “I have no idea. I didn’t enter any specific coordinates before we took off. We could be anywhere.” She proceeded to press a button that activated the scanner – the large viewscreen embedded in the wall across from the console platform. On the scanner, they saw a spooky forest and a yellow brick road that trailed through it.

            “That doesn’t look like the Park,” Rigby noted. “I don’t remember a yellow brick road being in it.”

            “Yellow brick road?” Shel uttered with familiarity. “I know where we are!”

            Benson detected the surprise in her tone. “Where are we, Shel?”

            “We’re in the realm of Oz!”

            “As in The Wizard of Oz? Like that movie?” Mordecai questioned.

            “That’s the one,” Shel confirmed.

            Rigby scoffed at the very idea. “That can’t be right. Since when can your TARDIS take us into movies?”

            “It’s been doing that the whole time, Rigby,” Shel said. “There are a few worlds I’ve been to within the infinite D.C. that I’ve seen in movies. Of course, some of them aren’t quite as flashy as Hollywood makes them out to be.”

            From the scanner, they suddenly saw Dorothy Gale, Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and Toto merrily trekking down the yellow brick road until their pacing slowed upon realizing the dark, scary woods they had come across. Shel, Mordecai, Rigby, and Benson knew these very woods to be where the characters first encountered the Cowardly Lion, enlisting him in their goal to obtain their desires from the Wizard himself.

            At least that was what was supposed to happen.

            From where the Cowardly Lion emerged in the dark, scary woods, there instead emerged a 7-foot-tall black alien creature with a long, muscular tail and a large, curved, oblong head.

            The sight of it horrified Benson. “What is that thing?!”

            Shel couldn’t believe her own eyes. “That’s a Xenomorph! But I don’t remember any one of them being in The Wizard of Oz!”

            Immediately, she rushed out of her TARDIS with Benson, Mordecai, and Rigby. They had to stop the Xenomorph alien from harming such innocent characters like Dorothy and her friends.

            Before they could reach them, however…

            BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! BLAM!

            Four powerful gunshots brought the Xenomorph down, one of them cracking open its oblong head. Its acid blood sprayed everywhere, eating away at grass and trees. Thankfully, no one was near it at the time.

            Shel doubted the shots came from Dorothy, Scarecrow, or the Tin Man.

            But when she looked their way, she was once again spellbound to see another foreign character in the realm of Oz: a tall, muscular man with a chiseled jaw wearing a brown leather jacket, snakeskin boots, and jeans kept up by a belt with a large, heavy buckle. In one hand, he brandished the smoking silver desert eagle that brought down the Xenomorph; in the other was what appeared to be a glowing movie ticket.

            To Mordecai, Benson, and Rigby, this man’s features were discernably similar to the Terminator models from their recent excursion.

            “Were we just saved by a good Terminator or a bad Terminator?” Rigby asked.

            “Neither,” said Shel, who apparently knew the stranger, judging from the smile on her face. “Guys, meet Jack Slater.”

            Holstering his desert eagle as he approached Shel and her companions, the man known as “Jack Slater” took out a cigar and lighter from his jacket. “Terminator, huh?” He even spoke with a noticeable Austrian accent that was nowhere near as lifeless as the Terminators Benson, Mordecai, and Rigby had seen. “Another Schwarzenheimer movie reference?”

            “That’s Schwarzenegger, Jack,” Shel corrected. “And what’re you doing in Oz?”

            “Shel, what’re you doing?!” Benson exclaimed. “Get away from this guy!”

            “Benson, it’s O.K.,” Shel reassured. “He’s not a Terminator, I promise you.”

            “Could a Terminator smoke a fine Cuban cigar like this?” Slater asked in between puffs. “I’ve been investigating anomalies across the infinite D.C., including that ugly I just gunned down a second ago, under the orders of the USF.”

            Slater flashed a badge to Shel. She expected it to be his LAPD badge. Instead, it was for an organization called “The Universal Security Forces.” Its insignia was that of a Spartan shield; Shel could not begin to comprehend the meaning behind it.

            “They recruited you?” Shel queried.

            “Yeah,” Jack replied. “One day, they came out of nowhere, find out about me being a dimension-hopper, and enlist me to track down another that’s been out there letting loose the anomalies.”

            Shel glanced at the glowing movie ticket in Slater’s hand. “I see you’re getting a lot of use out of that ticket Danny gave you. I take it you’ve been using it to find this rogue dimension-hopper?”

            “You bet I have,” Slater told her. “But it’s starting to look like I’ve exhausted the thing.”

            “Good thing you ran into me then,” Shel said with a smile.

            “That’s what I like about you,” Slater said. “I never have to ask you for help, ‘cause you already know that I need it.”

            Shel snickered. “Ain’t that the truth. C’mon. We’ll talk more in the TARDIS.”

            While Shel led Slater into her ship, Benson momentarily remained outside with Mordecai and Rigby to assign them an important task: “I need you two to keep a close eye on this ‘friend’ of Shel’s. She may claim to know all there is to know about him, but I just got a really bad feeling about him.”

            “Really, Benson?” Rigby said. “Don’t ya think you’re actin’ a bit jealous?”

            “I’M NOT JEALOUS!” Benson roared, involuntarily scaring the already-terrified Dorothy Gale and her friends out of the woods. “Just do what I say and do whatever’s necessary to stop this Slater guy when he shows his true colors or I swear that I’ll fire the both of you!”

            There was a more serious implication behind his usual threat of their termination.

            Benson’s feelings for Shel truly did outweigh his better judgment.