Infinite DC Journeys: Holiday Duality

            Oh, hello again. You’re, uh, you’re here for another story, aren’t you?

            Well, you’re in luck, because – as you probably already know – elves love to tell stories. I’ve, uh, already told you one before. Remember? The story of Buddy the Elf and how he reunited with his biological father and saved Christmas?

            Uh, well, I guess you can call this a “follow-up” to that story.

            While this is kind of still Buddy’s story, it’s really the story of Neas, the Gladiator of Gallifrey – that someplace pretty far from the North Pole…pretty far from Earth…it’s another planet in another dimension, as you might have, uh…as you might have guessed.

            You see, Neas isn’t just one person – she’s two.

            And they didn’t just save one Christmas…they saved two.

            It’s a “Holiday Duality,” as we call it here in the North Pole.

            It all started on the day of Christmas Eve. Santa was preparing to set off and deliver presents to all the good little boys and girls of the Earth. But something really horrible happened that day.

            “The presents have gone missing!” Ming-Ming (that’s the head elf) cried to the gasps of everyone in the workshop, including Buddy and his wife, Jovie – the only living humans in the North Pole, including their daughter, Susie.

            “How many are missing?” Santa asked Ming-Ming.

            Ming-Ming was great at taking inventory of all the presents prior to delivery. But, the number he gave nearly had some of us fainting: “Half a million are missing, Santa.”

            “Who would steal half a million presents?” Buddy asked.

            “How could they steal half a million presents?” Jovie also asked.

            Elf security soon reported that the, uh, culprits were still on the…on the premises. This urged Santa to place the workshop on lockdown. Buddy volunteered to search for the culprits of the crime, so Santa assisted him…and so did I.

            We eventually found the culprits in the storage room.

            They were three funny-looking guys in really bad elf costumes – the ears were, uh, cardboard cutouts by the look of it.

            At the time we caught them, these small, yellow cylindrical creatures tossed the stolen presents through some sort of magical portal in the storage room. They threw in the last stolen present before they jumped through it themselves. “Those were some weird little elves,” Buddy said of the culprits.

            “They weren’t elves, Buddy,” I told him. “T-They were imposters.”

            Not knowing where the presents and the criminals had gone, Santa placed the call to Neas. Now, uh, Santa was keenly aware of Neas’s existence, even though Neas journeyed across many worlds. “She’s more of a myth than I am,” he once said of her. She was so special that she was placed on the “Super Nice” list – and, uh, rightfully so. She’s saved Christmas dozens of times…once from the Grinch himself and another time from an evil magician.

            However, Santa’s call didn’t reach out to just one version of Neas. Two versions intercepted it.

            And by “versions,” I mean “regenerations.”

            Neas, being a Time Lord, has this special gift for becoming a different person every time she gets badly hurt or near the point of death. The two we got that answered Santa’s call were very beautiful (and very tall) young women – one a lovely African-American lady with blond hair (named Alicia), the other a redheaded Englishwoman (named Maureen). Perched on Alicia’s shoulder was Neas’s lifelong companion, Gizmo (a Mogwai).

            Both arrived outside the workshop in their domino-shaped TARDIS (that’s short of “Time And Relative Dimensions In Space”) ships, donned in festive regalia. We could hear Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas” playing out of their TARDISes.

            Clearly, they were dedicated to the mission of saving Christmas.

            “What’s the emergency, Santa?” Maureen asked in the utmost sternness.

            Santa filled them in on the situation and Buddy led them to the scene of the crime. Alicia and Maureen scanned the area with their sonic screwdrivers (they aren’t…they aren’t actual screwdrivers – just little probing devices that make whirring sounds). Together, they discovered the portal used by the culprits was more science than magic.

            “It’s an inter-dimensional portal,” Alicia said. “And it’s heavily unstable.”

            “What does that mean?” Buddy asked.

            “It means the stolen presents weren’t just sent between two dimensions,” Maureen said, “but scattered across multiple others.”

            This news discouraged Santa, Buddy, Jovie, me, and all the other elves.

            We thought all hope was lost.

            But, uh, thankfully, Alicia and Maureen reassured us, “With both of our TARDISes, we can recover the stolen gifts in literally no time at all. Each of those presents carry a nuage energy signature that we can easily track…like gingerbread crumbs.”

            So, uh, the Gladiators enacted their “Save Christmas” operation, conjoining their TARDISes – despite being physically separated. Buddy volunteered to accompany them across several universes. He told me later that he saw a world where everyone and everything were made out of LEGOs (as in the plastic brick construction toys) and that he also met some guy named “Lord Business.”

            Halfway into their mission, just as they visited their 4,050th world and collected a total of 100,000 presents, Alicia and Maureen discovered that the multitude of the stolen gifts ended up within one dimension – one that neither Alicia nor Maureen (or even Gizmo, for that matter) had been to in a very long time.

            A little town called Kingston Falls.

            So, Alicia and Maureen (with Buddy) arrived in Kingston Falls – a place neither of them had been in a long time. It was the home of their lifelong companion, Gizmo the Mogwai, who hadn’t been there himself for quite some time. They reunited with one of the town residents, a young man named Billy Peltzer who was Gizmo’s previous owner before he went into possession of Neas.

            Gizmo was pretty delighted to see Billy. Together, along with the two Gladiators and the other townsfolk, they looked on Santa’s missing gifts, which were collected into a massive, mountain-sized pile in the town square.

            “I don’t understand,” Billy said. “Christmas was just a few days ago for us. Where did all of these presents come from?”

            “From another dimension, Billy,” Maureen told him.

            “Really?!” Billy excitedly said. He only heard stories of Neas’s interdimensional adventures from the time he met her original incarnation (her name was “Candace”). But to see for himself just a sample of it astounded him.

            Meanwhile, the children of Kingston Falls attempted to take the gifts, until an airship rocketed into the scene and landed at the spot where the children took some of the gifts. “Put those down! They’re not for you!” the airship pilot yelled through a loudspeaker, having a distinct accent of some kind.

            Now, uh, this guy was Felonius Gru…and I can probably tell you at this point that he was the actual culprit of the stolen gifts, having sent his “minions” (those are those little yellow guys you read about in the last part) to do his dirty work.

            He threatened all the people of Kingston Falls – women, children, and men – with his so-called “Freeze Ray” and declared in one voice, “I’m taking all these gifts with me – every single one!”

            “But they’re not yours,” Buddy told Mr. Gru. “You’re stealing the Christmas joy from a lot of little girls and boys everywhere around the world.”

            For a fleeting second, Mr. Gru felt some guilt about his act of crime, but he quickly shirked it off and refuted, “I don’t care about other little girls, I only care about my…” He stopped himself on that statement before he could finish it. “I’m the greatest villain of all time! And that is the only reason I stole all these Christmas gifts! And I will freeze all your butts off if you even think of stopping me!”

            “Uh, Dad?” a young voice spoke from Gru’s airship.

            Everyone looked to the ramp to see three little girls step out.

            These little girls were Mr. Gru’s daughters: Margo (the oldest), Edith (the middle child), and Agnes (the youngest).

            Their surprise entrance flustered Mr. Gru, who hid his Freeze Ray behind his back and said to his girls, “Merry Christmas!” He then gestured to the mountain of stolen gifts. “Look at all these wonderful Christmas presents that are all for you girls!”

            Margo, Edith, and Agnes were taken aback by the massive pile of presents.

            “Whoa!” Edith said. “You really went all out, Dad!”

            “Only the best for my little girls!” Gru boasted.

            It was clear to Maureen, Alicia, and Buddy what was going on: Gru had stolen all the presents for his own daughters. He wasn’t the supervillain he made himself out to be. He was merely a devoted father.

            Alicia cautiously approached Mr. Gru and advised, “It’s time you were honest with your daughters, if you truly care about their Christmas joy.”

            “Zip it, tall elf lady!” Gru demanded through gritted teeth.

            “What’s she talking about?” Margo asked her father. “Are these gifts not actually for us?”

            Caught in his own deception, the dejected Mr. Gru gave up and confessed to his daughters, “No…they’re not for you. This is our first Christmas together as a family, and I didn’t even know what to get any of you.” Looking on the Freeze Ray in his hands, he shamefully added, “I was even gonna go back to being a villain again, just so I can give you girls the Christmas you deserve. I…I’m sorry.”

            While Margo, Edith, and Agnes were initially disappointed that the gifts were stolen and not theirs, they forgave their father. “You’re the only Christmas present we want this year,” Agnes told him before she and her big sisters gave Gru a group hug to the collective “Aww” of Maureen, Alicia, Buddy, and the Kingston Falls townspeople.

            Reinvigorated, Mr. Gru started making things right by shrinking the mountain of gifts and bringing them aboard his airship. He then said into a radio communicator, “Dr. Nefario! Open the portal to the North Pole! We’re going to return all the stolen presents!”

            “Return them?!” Dr. Nefario said over the radio. “What for?”

            “Because my girls already have the best Christmas gift they deserve,” Gru replied, smiling to his daughters.

            “Well, that’s nice and all, but there’s a huge problem,” Dr. Nefario alerted. “The growing instability of the portal has not only created copies all over the multiverse but placed all of the worlds in danger of imploding!”

            Gru was stricken by this news. “O.K., that is a huge problem!”

            Thankfully, he had the two Gladiators to help him in this crisis.

            Alicia and Maureen worked together in using their TARDISes to stabilize a single portal that Gru had Dr. Nefario open in the Kingston Falls town square. They initiated an NEP (that’s a “Nuage Energy Pulse”) wave that also dispersed the portal copies across the multiverse, leaving only the one between Kingston Falls and the North Pole.

            With the mission a success, the heroes of this journey returned to the North Pole with the presents, just in time for Santa to make his run. However, before he left, Santa gave some special gifts for Margo, Edith, and Agnes – and even Mr. Gru got one: a miniature scale model of a moon.

            “Not just any ol’ moon,” Santa told Gru. “That’s the real deal!”

            Of course, what Santa didn’t tell Mr. Gru was the shrunken moon was a gift he had gotten before. And the only ones who knew it were Alicia and Maureen.

            “Didn’t we get that for him back when we were ‘Cara’?” Maureen asked Alicia.

            Alicia smirked. “I won’t say anything if you won’t.”

            And so, that ends our little holiday tale.

            On that, I wish you all a Merry Christmas and, uh, a Happy New Year.

            And also, just a reminder for those of you without chimneys, don’t leave the door unlocked or the windows open. Santa can still get in without them…but a burglar can if you leave them open like that.

            A-Anyway…Merry Christmas, everybody.