Spotlight

The DeMolator

Back in the early days of motion pictures, a gimmick for keeping audiences coming back to the movies every Saturday was the serial. It featured a short episode of Captain Marvel, The Shadow, or Flash Gordon facing some despicable foe or desperate situation. At the end of each episode the hero would be placed in peril and would be left literally hanging off a cliff, hence the name "cliffhanger" was born.

SMC Michael Griggers asked State Sweetheart Christina Cheatham, who has a gift with the pen, to write a series of cliffhangers for the Word of the Day. They would have characters known to us and would place the State Officers in difficult positions from which they would have to use all their wits and determination to escape.

What follows is the full text of Episode I of "The DeMolator". Due to space limitations in the Word of the Day, only a portion of the story appeared in that publication. Episode I, in its entirety, is below.

And now, brace yourself for...

The DeMolator - Episode I

One of the great philosophical questions that has been passed down through time is whether or not those humanity deem insane are truly crazy, or if they simply are a part of a small minority of sane people. Perhaps Dad Bard decided to test this question when he, during his 'vacation' at the Ridgeview 'Hotel', decided to build... the DeMolator.

As all great epics begin, this one started with the ravings of a madman. James W. Bard, known to Georgia DeMolay as Dad Bard, had been driven insane by the incessant badgering by Peter Bard, his son and the up and coming Master Councilor for Samuel S. Lawrence Chapter. Dad Bard was checked into the Ridgeview Institute by Geoff Bard, his other son and soon-to-be State Senior Councilor, who had seen this break down coming for a while. As Dad Bard sat, strapped in his straight jacket (to prevent him from trying to type on the other patients' heads), rocking back and forth in the corner of white room with padded walls, he came to a realization.

"I'm here because those darn State Officers can't find their way out of a paper bag with out me lighting a fire under them...much less make it to a DeMolay Event! It's driving me crazy! I have to find a way to get them there without my telling them...I know! I'll lock them in a box and keep them in Geoff's room until I need them. No...wait. That means I'd have to feed them. If only there was a way to transport them instantaneously!"

Dad Bard looked around his bleak, white room for inspiration, and would have found none except for the small glint of light that caught his eye through the little window in his door. He scrambled to his feet, cursing the straight jacket for holding captive his hands, and rushed to the door. It was a simple thing that caught his eye, really: a television. However, crazy people don't see the world the way the rest of us do, and Dad Bard, instead of seeing a TV, saw a space/time transporter. The screen would be used so that he could see where the State Officers were at all times. The channel changing buttons would control where he would send the State Officers, the volume button would control the length of their stay, and the power button would send them there.

"I'm a genius," Dad Bard said as State Sweetheart Jennifer Moody, disguised as a nurse, walked in the room, "And you are a bunny."

Jennifer sighed, "Come on, Dad Bard, we've gotta go to Conclave."

Conclave 2005 came and went, but Dad Bard's idea haunted him throughout the event.

It would make travel safer... he would think as Dad Bohn rambled about something, and with the monitor, I could always be aware of what they are doing!

Finally, Conclave drew to a close, and Dad Bard rushed home to begin working on what he thought would be his greatest masterpiece ever.

"But what to call it?" he thought aloud as he drove home.

"What, Dad?" Geoff asked.

"Oh, nothing."

As the Bards pulled into their driveway, Dad Bard looked at Geoff and said, "Take Peter to a movie."

"What? Why?", Geoff protested, "I'm not going to a movie! I just got back. Besides, I don't have any money...I spent it all at the Trunk Store."

"What! I said go to a movie!"

"But Dad, We just got home!" Geoff was becoming alarmed.

"I said, go to the movies!" Dad Bard yelled.

"I can't go!"

"Yes you can! I said so!"

"I don't want to go... I'm tired."

"Sleep in the theatre!"

"So you want me to pay someone money to sleep?"

Dad Bard pulled out his wallet.

"I'm paying you to go enjoy a movie with your brother. Now, hurry up and go!"

"We're going to a movie!" Peter asked with big eyes, "Yay!"

"No we are not! I'm tired." Geoff said stubbornly.

"But Geoff...I wanna go...please..." His little brother pleaded.

"No."

"Please, please, please, please, pleasepleasepleaseplease..."

Both Dad Bard and Geoff began to twitch.

"How about this, if you can be really quiet for the rest of this week, I'll take you. But that means you can't say a word!" Geoff suggested.

Peter didn't respond.

"Well...?"

Peter didn't say anything.

"Peter! Answer your brother!" Dad Bard said impatiently.

"I can't! He won't take me to the movies if I say anything!"

Geoff sighed and said, "That's okay, Peter. It starts when we leave."

"Really? Okay. Why is the sky blue? What makes marshmallows so fluffy? Why can't caterpillars talk? Who is the muffin man-"

Geoff ran to the driver's seat.

"It starts now!" he said, started the van, and peeled out of the drive way.

Ordinarily, this would disturb Dad Bard, but a slightly maniacal grin crossed his lips as he watched them leave.

"Finally!" he said.

Dad Bard rushed into the house, locked the door, and put a chair in front of the knob. He then unplugged his television and carried it to a seemingly innocuous wall. He tapped the wall in three places. It was strange because instead of sounding like wood, these taps produced a ringing sound like that of a bell. Part of the wall lifted into the ceiling and Dad Bard stepped through the threshold to begin his devious work.

Two days later, Dad Bard anxiously prepared to start up his machine. He had decided, after much deliberation with the voices in his head, to call it the DeMolator.

He turned on his creation with a remote and programmed the State Officers into the DeMolator. Each officer had a number on the remote so that Dad Bard could bring up any one Officer on the screen. He then began to change channels on the TV to see where he wanted to send one of them. He finally found the channel with his house on it.

"I think I'll test it on my loving son, Geoff," he said with a grin.

He put in Geoff's number-02-and watched the screen. Suddenly, the screen showed Peter sitting outside of his house.

"What? I wanted Geoff...oh, wait. That's right...it shows the world through their eyes."

Dad Bard sighed and pressed the power button, stepping back in anticipation of his son appearing before him. Nothing happened.

Dad Bard pressed the button again, holding it down this time, but still no luck.

"No!!!!!" he yelled, falling to his knees.

"There's still a chance!" he said, and rushed to the phone.

About an hour later, Jon Challen, Assistant State Chapter Dad for the 2005-2006 term, stepped over the sleeping forms of Geoff and Peter, who were still locked out of the house.

"The Bards worry me sometimes," Dad Challen said as he reached to knock on the door.

Before he could even touch the door, Dad Bard's hand shot out and pulled Dad Challen in the house.

"Come with me," he said, and walked back towards his secret laboratory.

"What...no hello?" Dad Challen asked as he followed cautiously behind Dad Bard.

Maybe I should call Ridgeview again, he thought.

Dad Bard knocked on the wall again and darted into his lab before the door had even fully lifted up.

"Now entering the twilight zone," Dad Challen said.

He grabbed a chair to place under the raised entry just in case Dad Bard decided to lock him in and walked into the room. His jaw dropped as he entered room.

"I think I've died and gone to heaven," he said.

The whole room had wall-to-wall, state-of-the-art everything. Monitors glowed, lights flashed, bells whistled, and Dad Challen simply drooled.

"I didn't know you liked technology!"

"I don't, but I have found that to stay ahead of the game in this world, I have to have a working knowledge of this stuff, anyway."

Dad Challen looked at Dad Bard suspiciously.

"You just like having 'this stuff' because it's shiny, don't you?"

"No...I know how to use it...it is essential for...life..."

"Really? What does that machine do, then?"

"It...shows me the weather around the world."

Dad Challen sighed. He had pointed to a toaster.

"What do you need, then?"

Dad Bard touched Dad Challen's shoulder conspiratorially and said in a low voice, "I need you to fix the DeMolator."

"The what?"

"The DeMolator-it is a time/space traveling machine that I created to bring the State Officers to events instantaneously!"

"It looks like a television to me."

"It's not a TV! Are you insane?"

"Um...my mistake," Dad Challen said as though he were talking to, well, a madman.

"I got the monitoring system to work, but I can't figure out how to get the rest of it to work."

"What monitoring system?"

"I can now see exactly what each State Officer is doing with the simply push of a button," Dad Bard said, "This, for instance, is Geoff."

Dad Bard pressed 02 on the remote. The screen was black.

"He must be asleep," Dad Bard said.

"Right..." Dad Challen said, backing up towards the door.

"Wait! Don't go! Look-here's Michael!"

Dad Bard pressed 01, and suddenly the screen changed to the view of a game of Halo 2 on the television in...Michael's room! They listened as they heard Michael talk trash to his online opponents.

"So much for cleanliness of word," Dad Challen said.

Dad Challen looked at Dad Bard skeptically, but he was intrigued.

"Try Richie," he said.

Dad Bard pressed 03, and suddenly the screen revealed the inside of Richie's Cadillac going down I-75.

Dad Challen looked at the Speedometer.

"Wow-eighty-five miles per hour...I wonder where he's going in such a hurry."

"Now do you believe me?"

Dad Challen regarded Dad Bard for a moment, something nagging him, despite his interest in the technology behind this little experiment.

"How, exactly, did you get this monitoring system to work?"

"Well, I kind of put biomechanical nano-cameras into their food at Bennigans."

"You what?"

"Well, they wouldn't have just eaten the nano-cameras if I had asked them!"

Well, obviously, Dad Challen thought.

"I also slipped a few cameras into Christina's root beer at Grand Banquet."

That sounds so wrong.

"So will you help me?"

"My gut tells me that this is a really bad idea...but I just love the thought of just such a challenge," Dad Challen said.

"I had hoped you would say that."

They both grinned and Dad Challen pulled out his laptop.

After another two days (Geoff and Peter finally woke up and decided to stay at the Griggers' until their dad was sane again), the two Dads were finished.

"Well, it's now or never," Dad Challen said.

The DeMolator was radically different, now. Dad Challen had replaced the monitoring system, aka the television, with a touch screen laptop.

"Remotes are way too easy to lose," he had reasoned, "And the laptop enables you to send more than one officer at a time. It also makes the whole machine a lot easier to operate."

Dad Challen had also connected it directly to the Internet so that Dad Bard could locate where he wanted to send them with a search instead of flipping channels. Dad Challen had also enhanced the nano-camera receptor so that the transporter unit could actually pick up the officer's signal, which Dad Challen had decided was the problem with the system to begin with.

Dad Bard looked at the contraption with disgust.

"It's just a TV!" he said.

Dad Challen sighed. With all of the gadgets he had just attached to the DeMolator, it looked more like a mission control console at NASA. A nice control console, in fact.

"You worry me," he said.

"Why?"

"No reason," Dad Challen said quickly, "Let's try this out!"

Dad Challen touched the icon to view the new State Sweetheart's perspective. He figured of all of the officers, she probably had a strange enough sense of humor to appreciate what they were doing.

They turned the monitor on and watched as she was typing what appeared to be the first installment for the new Word of the Day cliffhanger on her laptop.

"Well, here goes nothing," Dad Challen said.

He pressed the transporter button and eagerly watched the screen. Christina disappeared from view for about three seconds...only to reappear right back where she was-hair frazzled and standing on end. Both the Dads laughed, despite themselves.

Christina jumped up, a bemused look on her face. Finally, she shrugged and sat back down, oblivious to her hair.

"You must not have set the place that she needed to go into the computer," Dad Bard said.

"I could have sworn I did," Dad Challen said.

He reset the coordinates and tried again. The same thing happened, but this time the tips of her hair were smoking. She finally noticed her hair and ran to the kitchen sink to rinse her hair.

They closed the laptop.

"I don't understand it," Dad Challen said, "The transporter unit is obviously picking up her signal, so why won't she transport?"

"Because you can't force anyone to do anything," Dad Fontenou said.

The other Dads jumped.

"How did you get in?" they both asked.

"I walked through the door..."

"Oh."

"You can't just force them to appear," Dad Fontenou said, "But you can make them want to appear."

Dad Bard rolled his eyes.

"This was just a stupid idea."

"It isn't physically possible," Dad Challen agreed.

"Nothing is impossible," Dad Fontenou said.

"This is," they both said.

"I've got to go," Dad Challen said, "It was an...interesting idea, anyway."

"I'll show you out," Dad Bard said.

They left, and Dad Fontenou started to follow, but he, instead, turned back to the DeMolator. He quickly brought all of the state officers onto the screen and plugged in a microphone from one of Dad Bard's many eclectic devices into the nano-camera receiver. He muttered a phrase into the microphone a few times, smiling as he watched the eyelids of the State Officers droop and the view become unfocused as they fell into a trance. Finally, he snapped his fingers.

"That should do it," he said.

He unplugged the microphone and rewired the DeMolator so that it could temporarily transport itself. He then set it to transport to his house so that he could program some safeguard commands before using it on the Officers.

However, unbeknownst to Dad Fontenou, he had actually sent the DeMolator to...Jonesboro Assembly #77.

Khrystle Rader, the Grand Worthy Advisor for the International Order of Rainbow for Girls, entered the lodge room for a meeting with the Supreme Inspector, Mom Hardison after her own assembly's meeting. She was shocked to find a laptop with strange gadgets attached to it right in between the East and the altar. It hadn't been there before.

"What is that?" Khrystle asked.

"I don't know, "Mom Hardison replied, "But it needs to be moved."

"It looks like it would be easy to break," Khrystle said.

She looked at the strange machine.

"I wonder what it does."

Mom Hardison winked, "Well, let's find out."

They turned on the laptop and waited for it to load what they thought would be Windows XP. They found as they waited a piece of tape with the word 'DeMolator' written with a sharpie on the side of the touch screen monitor.

" 'DeMolator'?" Mom Hardison wondered, "It figures. Who else would put a massive piece of junk in the middle of the East and the altar?"

She touched the icon that looked like a tiara and the screen revealed Christina once again as she looked at her still-singed hair.

"They use this to spy on Rainbows?!" Mom Hardison asked, shocked.

"No, that's Christina Cheatham," Khrystle said, "She isn't in Rainbow."

"So they are just spying on other girls?"

Khrystle looked at all of the icons and touched the icon labeled 'SMC.'

The screen spilt in two, and once again, a game of Halo 2 came up, only this time, Geoff and Peter were in the picture, too.

"A spy machine on DeMolay? Brilliant!" Mom Hardison said gleefully, "I wonder who made it?"

Khrystle shrugged, touching all of the icons. All of the State Officers were now on the screen. She looked at the keyboard and hit 'enter.' The screen now revealed a Google search page, but one of the options for searches was 'transport' Khrystle clicked that, her curiosity getting the better of her.

She thought for a moment and typed in 'Rock Quarry.'

A list came up, and Khrystle clicked on a link in the middle of the search page expecting it to send her to its webpage. Instead, the screen went blank for a moment.

"Uh-oh," Khrystle said, "I think I broke it."

"What?" Mom Hardison said, reaching for the keyboard.

Before she could touch it, however, the screen revealed a message written in green, Courier New font: Transport Complete.

"What does that mean?"

Khrystle and Mom Hardison looked at one another for a moment, neither one not quite sure what to make out of what they were witnessing.

"It must be some practical joke," Mom Hardison said

"Yeah...this sounds like something Richie would do," Khrystle agreed.

"Let's go get someone up here to help us carry this thing down."

They left the lodge room without a second thought. Unbeknownst to them, however, another Rainbow girl had decided to stay behind. Her name was Tiffany Ashley-Meagan Smith. She was a quiet girl who always wore baggy clothes and kept her raven black hair over her face. She had joined Rainbow in hopes of making friends, and while they were much nicer to her than her peers at school, she still felt like they couldn't see her sometimes. She had never liked the DeMolay boys, least of all the officers, because none of them ever noticed her at dances.

She looked at the screen and grinned malevolently. What Khrystle and Mom Hardison thought was a practical joke Tiffany knew to be real: all of the State Officers had been transported to the edge of a cliff! This was a perfect opportunity-she'd make them see her, even if it was the last thing they did!

Stay tuned for the next episode of "The DeMolator" in the September Word of the Day.

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