AS THE LAST EXPLOSION of green light tore through the Cherokee village, some outlaws believed it was divine punishment for the evil things they had done.
The Cherokee took it as a sign that Great Spirit had come to their aid. So then everyone was really surprised when out of the blinding flash came a three-hundred-year-old heavily modified Renaissance gondola, with outdated scientific equipment, small animals at various stages of throwing up, a bare-chested gondolier, a stunned-looking professor type, a young Italian holding an escaped frog, a rabbit with facial hair, and a soaking-wet girl in light-up shoes clinging to ropes at the side of the vessel. The small Venetian watercraft crash-landed on the grass outside Sequoyah’s house, to a stunned silence.
Gertie stared at the strange-looking men in long-tailed jackets, who were carrying rifles. On of the other side of the boat were Cherokee warriors, and behind the gondolier—a pack of bewildered wolves.
Then one of the older outlaws pointed a bony finger at Giro.
“Look, it’s Jesus!”
Gertie didn’t understand what was happening. “How can we have traveled over the graviton bridge with the gondola, and Giro, and all the animals?”
“The boat must have been attached to us in some way,” Kolt said quickly, “and the B.D.B.U. thought we meant to bring it with us. It happens from time to time, as does landing in the middle of a battle.”
“Keepers!” Mandy Zilch screamed, unable to contain her disgust.
“Losers!” Gertie cried. “This gets weirder and weirder.”
“Mashed potato fly?”
“It could always be worse!” said Kolt, noticing a piece of rope hovering in midair as though the gondola was attached to something invisible.
Suddenly, in a blinding pink flash, a three-hundred-ton stolen Portuguese warship, with a crew of sixty-four bloodthirsty pirates, exploded through the time portal and came to rest (leaning but upright) atop several crushed clay-and-wood houses.
The outlaws, the Cherokee warriors, and even the pack of wolves were now completely bewildered by the sight of a pirate ship with a full pirate crew, who were just standing around on deck wondering why they were no longer floating.
The captain looked sheepishly over the side of his ship. “Who be you people in strange clothes with hand muskets!?”
“And where be the sea? It was here a minute ago,” Gertie heard one of the other pirates say.
An outlaw stepped forward. “Er, we’re evil mercenaries who’ve been hired by a cruel sheriff to capture a small boy for an outrageous amount of money, and these are the rightful people of this land, the Cherokee, who were about to try and stop us.”
“Oh, I see, sort of a battle then?” said the captain.
Everyone on the ground looked at one another and nodded.
“Yes, exactly,” said the outlaw.
“And might you know,” the captain went on, “where the sea has gotten to?”
“Can’t help you with that one . . .” said the outlaw. “I don’t even swim.”
“Me neither,” said another voice.
“Nor me,” said another.
Then one of the Cherokee got to his feet. “I’m Sequoyah!” he shouted to the pirate captain on the boat. “Welcome to our village.”
“Sequoyah!” Kolt said. “I know you! Hello, hi, hello!”
The kind inventor raised his hand in greeting. “We know each other?”
“Not really, but I have something for you! Some kind of alphabet.”
“Not a syllabary?”
Kolt looked at the paper in his hands. “Yes, it could be that actually. . . .”
“If it is, then praise Great Spirit! I thought I was going to have to start all over again. Thank you, stranger!”
“I’ll bring it down after this battle business is decided—wouldn’t want it to get damaged.”
“Who are you, stranger?”
“Well, I’m a sort of a curator of objects, and these men are bloodthirsty pirates, who terrorize the Adriatic Sea on stolen ships.”
The pirate captain nodded. “We were just about to be cannonballed by the Venetian naval fleet, after dropping anchor just outside Venice so that my wife, Martha, could get medical treatment from a small boy with a floating chemistry set.”
Giro put his hand up to signal that he was the “small boy.”
“It really is Jesus!” said a voice in the crowd. “Performing miracles with the help of that magic frog.”
One of the outlaws took off his hat and scratched a bald head. “Pirates?” he said. “I think I read about you somewhere? Bandits on boats, right?”
The pirate captain smoothed his hair. “Oh, so you’ve heard of us then?”
“Yes, of course,” said the outlaw. “You terrorized the seas for hundreds of years, and as such were a great inspiration to me as a boy, hence my current profession.”
“Me too.” One of the other outlaws nodded. “I love how you made people walk the plank; that was just so original.”
The captain chuckled. “Well, we honestly try our best.”
The outlaws laughed at that.
“Who is the rabbit soldier with the mustache?” shouted someone in the crowd. “He’s cute!”
“Dollop?”
“SHUTTTTTT UPPPPPPP!” cried Mandy Zilch. Her face was red with rage. “Get the Keeper boy, you imbeciles!”
But the opportunity for a vicious battle seemed to have passed, and everyone was now more interested in talking about what had happened, and perhaps wondering what might appear next in a flash of colored light.
“What Keeper boy?” Gertie shouted, feeling the key in her pocket start to vibrate madly.
“Shut your mouth!” Mandy Zilch screeched. “Milk scum!”
“MUSH ROOM!” cried Robot Rabbit Boy.
“What boy is it they’re after?” Kolt shouted to Gertie.
“She didn’t say!”
“It’s me they want,” came a small voice from the hull of the pirate ship.
Kolt peered down at him. “Looks like you were almost crushed by the pirate ship!”
“Mashed fly.”
“I was!” said the boy. “But thankfully all I lost was a shoe.”
“That’s good, but do you know why the Losers are trying to capture you?”
Then Gertie noticed Mandy Zilch was holding a magnetic cuff. “He must be a missing Keeper,” she shouted before the boy could answer. “Look what the Loser girl is holding, Kolt! It’s a magnetic cuff! And the Keepers’ key is buzzing like crazy!”
“You’re right, Gertie, he must be one of your missing Keepers. I can’t believe it. A new Keeper, in the flesh!”
Gertie had forgotten about Giro with all the excitement of finding a lost Keeper. “Are we dead?” he asked, tugging lightly on her sleeve. “Is this heaven?”
“No,” Gertie said, “but it’s goodbye, I’m afraid, as anything that accidentally travels through time with Keepers is soon catapulted back.”
“We’ve traveled through time? Future or past?”
“I shouldn’t say,” she told him, “but I can tell you that everything you’ve figured out about the little creatures is true.”
“It is?”
Gertie nodded. “You’re actually really, really clever, so keep working because the world needs your ideas.”
As there was no time for lengthy explanations, she leaned in and gave Giro a hug.
“I’ll miss you,” he said.
“Look after those animals, especially the frog.”
Then, without wasting any more time, Gertie jumped out of the gondola and sprinted toward the small figure the Losers had been trying to kidnap.
“What are you doing!” Mandy Zilch screamed at the outlaws. “Get the boy!”
“But it doesn’t feel right anymore,” one of the outlaws said.
“Yeah,” said another. “It’s like a crazy dream, where you need the toilet but can’t seem to find one and eventually it starts to hurt.”
“And then Jesus comes!” shouted someone from the back of the group. Everyone nodded in agreement, then resumed talking among themselves.
Just then, the pirate ship and its crew, along with Giro and his gondola, disappeared with a loud pop, leaving a few crushed Cherokee houses and a faint pink mist.
“Well, there they go!” said Kolt, who had hurried over to Sequoyah to return the syllabary. The sudden disappearance of the ships was too much for the outlaws, and they ran off into the woods.
But Mandy Zilch was not about to give up her prize. After gathering the wolves under her control into a single pack, she let them loose again. They tore across the dirt at a frightening speed toward Gertie and the young Keeper.
Just as they were about to make a leap for their victims, Robot Rabbit Boy twitched his nose three times, causing a red laser beam to shoot from one of his nostrils. The result was an enormous BOOM! and everyone was splattered by an explosion of dirt. When the smoke cleared there was a deep hole in the ground with angry wolves at the bottom of it. Unfortunately, the hole was so big that Max was now hanging on to a tree root to stop himself from falling on top of the snarling wolf pack.
“Grab my hand!” Gertie cried out, as she skidded to a stop at the edge of the pit.
“What?” Max said. “Who are you?” Just as the tree root snapped, he reached for Gertie’s outstretched arm.
“Kolt!” she cried. “I can’t hold him for long!”
But Kolt was already there, fiddling his key into the lock as Robot Rabbit Boy grabbed Gertie’s feet to stop her slipping into the hole with the boy.
With a flash of neon green light, the four Keepers landed as a gasping tangle of bodies back on the island of Skuldark, bruised and battered but delirious with joy and relief.
They had done it. Returned two very important items, saved one of their own from a Loser kidnapping, met pirates, and all while managing to lose only one thing—Robot Rabbit Boy’s fake mustache—which Kolt thought was the perfect end to the first-ever great Keeper rescue.