Dawn on Jefferson (scifi story): Chapter Twenty Three - Shall Stay in Motion...

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…

An alarm sounded. Of course, the alarm sounded as I was starting to eat. An alarm, the alarm, would ONLY sound when I started. Had I waited to eat until after school, the whole plan would have gone off like it was supposed to: the whole series of events was really, actually triggered by my first bite into my sandwich. It's a Schrödinger thing. But, no, I was hungry and had to eat at lunch like a normal person. So, obviously, Maven just had to jump the gun and send a Derplicate to raid the chemistry closet at lunch. She planned it this way.

No lunch for Aurora. Nope, nope. uh, uh, nooooo.

Maven was a monster.

A lunch ruining monstrosity.

Foul beast. Evil witch.

Jerk.

Before we could have reacted, the drones in the school rushed in with flashing red and blue lights off to the problem place. And we jumped into action and ran towards the drones like all the other kids and then went out the side. Zipping to the airlock, we grabbed our leathers and zipped up. We must have looked like band of spastic mimes with too much caffeine.

We zipped up and checked out. We always check out. No one needed to die because an alien bug, that ever evil taxito, could have wanted to take a small bite. That could have totally ruin our adventure. Out the door we ran. Out of the school grounds and across town.

No one stopped us.

We only ran into Mr. Tennyson who gaped at us like he was some sort of fish out of water. We knew we were an even faster clock than we'd planned. We ran as fast as we could to the fort and gathered our stuff.

What we didn't know as we were running across town to our fort was Aitan and Juan the Derplicate had had a run in.

Aitan, bless his heart but not his thick head, had followed around the Derplicates a touch too closely and decided to confront Juan as soon as the Chem closet was open. Aitan thought I'd be more impressed with him if he showed me what a strong alpha geek he was. He jumped Juan. And Juan is big. Aitan was tossed away like a rag doll in a tornado. He flopped away like an albatross on the ground and tried to get away. Juan, derplicated, was not as bright and left the block of sodium on the counter. Aitan in his spasms of what could not even under the most generous circumstances be called fighting knocked the sodium into the sink of the chemistry station. Somehow, one of them knocked the water faucet on.

And the rest was a big fire and a moderately big boom.

And a very destroyed sink.

Neither was hurt, but...they were radpily glued to the wall outside the chem lab: the drones had caught them.

Maven had sent Juan to get the sodium block at lunch. She had a hunch I might betray her but really wanted the exploit. So, she thought she'd get the job done and delivered so she could get her hack. She even, as Juan was going to get the sodium, snagged the package we left for her. She opened it up...and more alarm bells went off.

The worm launched and the cyber bots detected it. They were too slow to catch the worm as it jumped from booster to booster, growing faster and faster, infecting and FIXING more and more boosters. However, the cyber security bots fingered where the worm had been launched from and within minutes another set of drones had peeled off and careened across town to where Maven was...which was the opposite side from where our fort was.

Signed, sealed and delivered. Maven had been taken down.

Or more properly, glued to a wall.

I was really glad I didn't see Maven for a while after that. She was scary enough as it was. After a good gluing, I can only imagine her as absolutely terrifying.

My only real worry was Aitan. He's nice, but weird and I didn't want him in trouble. He refused to say anything. And I'd already deleted his GPS being where I'd been before I'd patched his booster so no matter what, Maven was not getting the poor Awknerd in petty retribution. I couldn't have done that to the poor guy.

We had arrived at our fort and we loaded up. Jackie and Tom put on the packs. We were going to take turns. Modern packpacks came with exoskeleton legs, robot legs, that would were strapped onto your own legs so you did not have to actually carry the weight on your back.

Much to my surprise, as I tapped and got out the clean boosters from the wall, Tom and Rosa each tapped on different sections of the wall. Rosa pulled out an Immie drone, she stated it was clean. Tom pulled out something that surprised us all: a real gun, not just a needler, not a pellet gun. He quickly explained he was a good shot and had been practicing for years with his Mom. Compared to a needler, compared to the pellet gun he'd brought on the night this all started, it looked huge and powerful and scary. However, it was really a very small rifle, a .22.

I didn't know how I felt about the Court Jester being a Gun Packing Sharpshooter, too. It was a little weird.

As they used to say though: weird is wonderful.

And that thought made it weirder.