Dawn on Jefferson(scifi story): Chapter Twenty-Four - Until Acted Upon by Something Absolutely Annoying!

unfortunately, I have neither the talent nor the money to get the fort drawn propery. Sorry

Chapter One: Getting Up
Chapter Two: Where I Live
Chapter Three: The Walk
Chapter Four: School
Chapter Five: Introducing my Friends, the Merry Pranksters!
Chapter Six: Walking to Mom's
Chapter Seven: Mom’s House
Chapter Eight: It Began on Constitution Hill
Chapter Nine: Attack of the Awknerds!
Chapter Ten: No Awknerds Were Harmed
Chapter Eleven: The Breaking Shadstorm
Chapter Twelve: Where I Envy Grilled Cheese
Chapter Thirteen: Doom! Doom! Doom! Where I Want to go to School! The End Must be Nigh!
Chapter Fourteen: The Game is a Foot
Chapter Fifteen: Uncomfortable Revelations!
Chapter Sixteen: WAITAMINUTE!
Chapter Seventeen: The Healing Power of Popcorn
Chapter Eighteen: The Lessons Learned Before Maven
Chapter Nineteen: No Haven From Maven
Chapter Twenty: Meeting Maven
Chapter Twenty-One: And Then I was Roasted Alive and Served Up With a Worm
Chapter Twenty-Two: That Which has Been Set in Motion…
Chapter Twenty-Three: Shall Stay in Motion...

Chapter Twenty-Four: Until Acted Upon by Something Absolutely Annoying

What I did next was either the most brilliantly stupid or stupidly brilliant thing I had ever done to that point in my life: I made Tom leave the gun in his hidey hole. For all my dazzling brilliance, I nearly got roasted again by my Merry Pranksters again! The nerve! They wanted the gun for whatever we encountered. And I got it, I really, really did. A gun would give us some protection...but it was far more likely to get us killed.

WE ARE TWELVE YEARS OLD!

Whatever we would have encountered that would have require a gun to stop, we'd have been in far too much trouble to deal with even with a gun: we were going to go looking for someone in chameleon skinned armor! On an alien world! It would have also given us a false sense of security. If needlers could not handle the problem, we really ought to have been running away or at least up a tree, as fast as we could, not having Tom open up like some soldier or hunter.

So, I made him leave the weapon in his hideyhole. Sometimes the smartest thing to do is run away. Especially when you are twelve. We were not rugged warriors yet: we were simply slightly pimply Merry Pranksters.

We counted to three and pulled our boosters. It was not a physical pulling but rather a pause program I had written: they pretended to give updates and health information and locations for us. It bought us a bit of time before we the adults looking for us. If they were not looking already.

The clean boosters I had were brought up and we synced with them. Their link to the planetary net was turned off and they would only talk to each other. It would not have stopped the adults from finding us, but it would delay it considerably.

Then, we ran.

We had to skirt around Shadwell. Our fort was off the southwest. We needed to swing wide to Constitution Hill, which was to the north. However, we needed to keep our distance from town for two reasons. The first was simply not to be seen: duh! The second was the clean boosters could have been detected by radio trackers if we got too close. And we didn't want to get caught just simply because we were impatient! Oh to be undone by simply not taking care! No kid would have EVER made that mistake! ha!

We moved carefully. We had all taken classes in forestcraft: if you live on the edge of an alien forest, you had BETTER take a class and practice what you learn. Otherwise, the forest became a vicious, voracious monster in your mind and you wanted to destroy it. We came to Jefferson for a new life, not to become the invading monsters and destroyers. Some space had to made for us, but we wanted to understand our new home and live as much in harmony as we could.

Besides, it was fun sneaking around. We were some of the best at it.

We made slow time to where I had found the helmet. The clearing was much the same. However, there was a banner saying to stay away and a fence up and around the site. The fence was not a physical one: rather it was a bunch of poles with sensors on them to tell the people watching the site if something or someone passed through. It was meant more to deter the curious rather than stop anyone. One could only attempting to stop an Upchuck with anything other than a wall: they were big, horned and ugly with a disposition to match. Think alien moose crossed with a hippo with a lot of weird stuff thrown in, but not really like any of those things.

What the fence was NOT meant to stop was a Merry Prankster. Because a Merry Prankster could always find a way and we'd defeated better security than this in the past. We sent Maven and her Derplicates to the chemical closet, right? You might think we did that because we knew whoever was going would be caught and it was an impossible task.

We knew SHE and her derps would be caught (but, yes, I did send poor Aitan to spy as a backup, just in case). However, we have raided the chemical closet a few times now. You can look up what happens when you flush pure metallic sodium down a toilet: we did it in small amounts, no toilets were actually exploded. It was tempting though. Permanginate, sometimes known as the purple menace, makes an awesome purple dye. Just ask the cheerleaders and what it did to their hair! And their hands! And their clothes! And, well, the rest of them! And when you're all grown up we'll introduce you to what ammonia and iodine can do together, children.

If we had time, we would have figured out what watch poles collected for data, looked back into their logs for other days and then fed a loop of data into the watchpoles that was, well, false. After we hacked them, of course. You have to remember: what you see, what you hear, what you taste to a computer or a person, it's just really data. If you faked the data going in, they could not tell the difference. If its done well. And that takes time. Time we didn't have.

We were staring at the watchpole fence and thinking when Jackie started climbing the nearest tree. If you couldn't go through a fence, you ought to go over it. We looked at each other and up we went. What? You don't climb trees on Earth? What sort of weirdos are you!? I guess we might have looked weird to you though: leather clad monkeys or something stranger.

Jackie climbed up and over and dropped down from a tree limb. And down she went. Actually rather gracefully. There were times I was envious, but just times. The rest of us came down a little less cat-like. Tom made it into a grand gesture of goofiness. You would have sworn he was part rag doll and part windmill. All the way around, he was a comedian as he landed on his rump and let his roll around in a circle like it might fall off. The goof. I...didn't land with cat-like grace, but we won't discuss that.

We all got up. We all dusted off. We all made sure the leathers were in place. We were okay.

Then came the bad news.

We looked around the clearing. We all but crawled with our noses in the dirt looking for clues like hounds for a smell or a pigs for truffles.

But there were none to be had. Not a single stinking clue. The site had too many people there and a lot, a lot of Jefflife had come through. Any tracks would have been obliterated. We were just really out of luck.

We were stopped cold and possibly in a lot of trouble...for no results.

To make matters worse, there was a flashing light approaching: a security drone. We were really in trouble.

Drones. It was always drones. Why did it have to be drones?!