“Timothy Templeton, office ninja!” I cried as Boss Baby and I made our way down an empty hallway. My heart was pounding. Our mission was off to an exciting start.
“Shhh!” Boss Baby warned me.
He stopped in front of a door that read: KEEP OUT! NO KIDS ALLOWED.
“It’s almost like it’s begging us to go in,” Boss Baby said suspiciously.
We pushed open the door.
The room inside was dark. We shone our flashlights around and saw some tables and chairs. The door behind us creaked shut.
“This is getting creepy,” I said.
Then a spotlight shone on a box stacked on top of a short pedestal.
“That’s it! The file!” Boss Baby cried.
We ran up to it. There was a file folder on top of the box, labeled: NEW PUPPY—TOP SECRET.
Boss Baby reached for it, but I slapped his hand away.
“No, I’ve seen this before somewhere,” I said. I think it was a movie. The adventure guy knew that if he picked up the statue he was stealing, an alarm would go off. So he had to replace the statue with something the exact same weight. “We’ve got to find something to replace it with.”
Boss Baby nodded. “You’re right, like another file?”
I nodded, and he picked up a file laying on top of another box. “Smead manila. Pressboard edges. About fifty ounces. Wait, no . . .” He took one page out of the file. “49 ounces. Try this one.”
I took it from him and got ready to make the switch.
“Wait!” Boss Baby said. He took a paper clip from his jacket pocket and placed it carefully on the replacement folder. “Now it’s perfect.”
I held the fake file in my left hand, and placed my right hand over the real file. I had to make the switch at the exact same time. Boss Baby stood next to me, watching. He was so excited that he was starting to drool.
I took a deep breath . . . and switched them. No alarm went off! I had done it!
Boss Baby grabbed the file from me and stared at it. But a drop of drool fell from his mouth onto the fake file. The pedestal under the box began to sink into the floor.
“Uh-oh,” I said.
“Oops,” said Boss Baby.
We had triggered some kind of trap! The lights came on and we saw that we were in the middle of some crazy kind of machine. A paddle knocked into a boot, and the boot kicked a bucket that dumped a ball down a slide. Then the ball hit a lever, and a bathtub came up from the floor.
“I feel like we should run,” I said.
“I know, but it’s just so mesmerizing,” said Boss Baby.
I nodded. “I kinda want to see how it ends.”
“Yeah, me too,” he agreed.
The ball kept rolling. It rolled down a hole and landed on a seesaw. Sitting on the other end of the seesaw was the guy in the puppy costume—Puppy Co. Pete! He launched through the air and landed in the tub. Water splashed, and a cage fell from the ceiling and crashed down around Boss Baby and me.
“Well, that didn’t end well,” Boss Baby said. He opened up the secret file. There was a piece of paper inside with one word:
GOTCHA!
Then Puppy Co. Pete started to laugh. A trapdoor opened underneath us, and Boss Baby and I dropped down through the floor. We each landed in a soft chair shaped like a puppy. Each puppy’s arms closed around us, locking us into place. Puppy Co. Pete dropped down from the ceiling too, but he didn’t get locked into a chair like we did.
Then a black leather office chair swirled around, revealing a guy in a business suit.
“You’re right on time,” he said.
“Francis Francis?” I couldn’t believe it.
“I see you’ve met my big brother, Eugene,” he said, pointing to Puppy Co. Pete. Eugene took off his puppy head to reveal his human face.
“What is all this?” Boss Baby asked.
Francis Francis laughed. “Perhaps you recognize me from my youth!”
He pulled a rope, separating two curtains behind him to reveal a painting of a really, really fat baby in a business suit.
Boss Baby’s eyes got big. Really big. “Super Colossal Big Fat Boss Baby?”
“Whoa, he is . . . him?” I asked. “And him is you?”
Francis Francis nodded.
“How did you end up here?” Boss Baby asked in disbelief.
“You know what I do to little kids who ask lots of questions about me?” he asked. “Eugene!”
Eugene ripped off his puppy costume and took a book out of the pocket of his business suit.
“I read them my story,” Francis said. “Eugene, my chair!”
Eugene lowered his big body to form a chair, and Francis Francis hopped into his lap. Then he opened his storybook and began to read: “A long, long time ago, I was a hot-shot executive, headed straight to the top! They gave me a promotion . . . the corner office . . . my very own—”
Boss Baby cut him off. “Personal potty?”
The picture of the shiny potty in the storybook said it all.
“Everyone loved me!” continued Francis Francis. “I had it all. The whole pie. And then, one day, I got called in to see the board of directors.”
“Who are the boring directors?” I asked.
“The biggest baby bosses of them all,” Francis Francis replied. “I thought they loved me, but I was wrong. They replaced me with someone new.”
“That’s horrible!” I cried.
“Yes, Tim, it was,” Francis Francis said. “All of a sudden, she got all the love. All the attention. You know how that feels, don’t you, Tim? It hurts, doesn’t it?”
I looked at Boss Baby and then I turned back to Francis Francis. “Yeah . . . it does. And then what happened?”
“I learned that babies are selfish, greedy little creatures,” he went on. “They fired me and took away my special formula. Then they sent me down to live with a f-family!”
But Francis Francis had a plan.
“Baby Corp. stole all the love from me, and now I’m going to take it back with . . . the Forever Puppy.”
He flipped to the next page of his book and showed us a picture of the cutest puppy ever! But he didn’t stop there. He showed us a picture of the puppy with a baby. In the next picture, the baby was a toddler, but the puppy was still a puppy. The next picture showed that the baby had grown into a kid my age—and the puppy was still a puppy. He kept flipping, and the kid became a grown-up, but the puppy stayed the same!
“Imagine a puppy that never gets old,” Francis Francis said. “Never grows up. A puppy that stays a puppy forever. It’ll be so adorable! Once I launch my Forever Puppies, no one will ever love a baby ever again! The end of babies . . . the end of Baby Corp.!”
“Ha!” Boss Baby said. “A puppy that never grows up is impossible.”
Eugene grabbed my backpack.
Francis Francis grinned. “You’re right,” he said. “Why, you’d need some sort of . . . youth formula.”
Eugene took Boss Baby’s bottle out of my backpack.
“My super secret baby formula!” Boss Baby cried.
Francis Francis was delighted. “You walked right into my trap. You brought me the very thing I needed to make the Forever Puppy a reality! I mean, who would actually take children to a place of business?”
“I knew it!” cried Boss Baby. “You were my hero. How could you do this? How could you betray your company?”
“Baby Corp. betrayed me!” Francis Francis said.
“You’ll never get away with this,” Boss Baby said.
“Oh, but I will,” Francis Francis said confidently. He pushed a button on his desk. A screen on the wall lit up, showing my parents in the lobby. They were looking for me and Boss Baby!
“I’m taking them both with me to Las Vegas,” Francis Francis said. “So stay out of my way. I’d hate for them to get fired.”
That didn’t sound good. But I knew something that Francis Francis didn’t.
“They’d never leave us alone,” I said.
“Oh, really?” Francis Francis asked. “Wait until they meet Puppy Co.’s certified in-house childcare expert.”
He nodded toward Eugene. In the blink of an eye, the big guy was suddenly wearing a dress! And there was a gray wig on his head! He looked like some kind of weird grandma.
“Oh no!” I groaned.