The Training Master

  To the Sensational Seto Sisters:

  Elizabeth, Christina, and Katherine

  Chapter 1

  My name is Akiko. I’m a lot like most fifth-grade girls, but I’m different from all of them in at least one big way: I’ve got friends from another planet. A planet called Smoo.

  Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? It is. Mostly. The time my friends and I went to the Sprubly Islands and met Queen Pwip, for example. That was fun. Seeing all the weird animals at the Intergalactic Zoo was fun. Then there was the time I got to fly a rocket ship in a race called the Alpha Centauri 5000. That was a lot of fun.

  But it can be pretty tough, too. In fact, sometimes having friends from Smoo means getting covered with mud, sleeping in holes, and eating some of the nastiest, slimiest, stinkiest gunk in the entire universe. I ended up doing all three not too long ago, and let me tell you, it wasn’t easy. There were times when I wasn’t sure I’d make it through alive.

  It started a few months back, on an ordinary Saturday morning, at the Fowlerville mall.

  I was shopping for blue jeans in this place called Lisa Sparx. They specialize in all kinds of neon pink and lemon yellow sequined clothes that—trust me—I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing even on Halloween. For some reason, though, they sell the only kind of blue jeans I really like: blue, but not too blue, baggy, but not too baggy.

  I was in the store by myself. My mom was at one of those older-lady clothing places two stores down.

  It had been months since I’d hung around with my friends from the planet Smoo. Spuckler, Poog, Gax, and Mr. Beeba had dropped me off after our last adventure and blasted into space, and that was the last I’d seen of them. At first I was happy to get back to my normal daily routine at Middleton Elementary. After nearly being crushed inside the Jaws of McVluddapuck and coming within a hair of an alien-induced brainmelt, there’s a lot to be said for a place where the biggest horror you face is having your favorite writing utensil chewed up by a windowsill pencil sharpener.

  But as the weeks rolled by, something funny happened. I started missing the excitement. The danger, even. I’d had it with book reports and pop quizzes. I wanted to get back to multieyed spacemen and rusty-hulled rocket ships. Dodgeball? It has its charms, sure, but it doesn’t compare to dodging Nizziks on the planet Quilk or wrangling with thramblewood on Toog. Even the cafeteria food fights didn’t thrill me the way they used to. There was no getting around it: I needed an intergalactic space adventure, and I needed it soon.

  But it wasn’t as though I could call Spuckler on the phone or fire off an e-mail to Mr. Beeba. There was no way of getting in touch with them. I had to just sit tight and wait.

  So I waited.

  And waited.

  Every morning on the way to school and every afternoon on the way home I kept my eyes on the sky, inspecting each passing airplane as a potential blue and red Smoovian rocket ship. Every day I checked for mysterious letters in the mail telling me they were coming to get me and instructing me to “be at your bedroom window at eight o’clock.” The letters never came and neither did my friends, but every night I was at my bedroom window at eight o’clock anyway, just in case.

  One day I came home from school and my mom told me there was a guy in the living room from the cable company replacing our cable box with a new one.

  He could be from the cable company, I thought. Then again, he just might be from …

  I ran into the living room. There he was: hunched over, his back to me, fiddling noisily with the cable box and humming an extremely tuneless tune. He had shaggy hair and, from what I could see, an unshaven chin.

  “Dagnabbit!” he said, yanking furiously at a stubborn cord.

  Dagnabbit? There’s only one guy in the universe I know who says dagnabbit, and that’s …

  “Spuckler?” I whispered. “Spuckler! Is that you?”

  “Buckler?” he said, turning to face me. He had a bushy black mustache and thick Coke-bottle glasses. Apart from the hair, the stubble on his chin, and the didn’t-have-time-to-shower body odor, he was nothing like Spuckler. “Naw, little girl. Name’s Floyd. Floyd Ferguson.”

  It was all I could do to stop from tossing my backpack to the floor in disappointment. If you’re going to be a cable repairman who says dagnabbit, the least you can do is be Spuckler in disguise.

  “Once knew a guy named Buckler,” he said, turning back to wrestle with the cord. “Short bald guy with bad breath.”

  So here I was, several months later, shopping for blue jeans and trying not to go crazy from the boredom of my fifth-grade life. I’d just gone into the Lisa Sparx changing room and was halfway into a pair of jeans when suddenly there was a knock on the door.

  tunk tunk tunk

  “Open up,” said a girl’s voice. “It’s me.”

  “Me who?” I asked.

  “Me you, that’s who.”

  I finished putting on the jeans and opened the door. As promised, it was me. The robotic replacement me, that is: the one my friends from Smoo always brought with them to take my place while I was off in outer space having adventures.

  Yes! They’re back!

  I poked my head out into the corridor, fully expecting to see Spuckler, Mr. Beeba, Gax, and Poog right behind her. But no: she was alone.

  “Quick, get in here,” I said. The robot Akiko stepped into the changing room with me and I locked the door.

  “Boy, it’s really great that you’re here,” I said. “But you’ve got to be more careful. What if someone saw you?”

  “Plenty of people saw me,” she replied, smiling the same smile I’d seen in the mirror all my life. “Don’t worry, though, Akiko. No one paid me any mind.”

  That’s when I noticed something. The Akiko robot looked like me, all right: the fourth-grade me from a year ago. I’d changed a lot since then: I wasn’t as round-faced anymore, and my pigtails had grown by at least three or four inches.

  “This is going to be a big problem. You can’t replace me like this,” I said to the robot. “You don’t look like me.”

  “I don’t?”

  “Well, not exactly like me. See how long my pigtails are now?”

  The robot examined the length of my hair, frowned a bit, then raised her hands and grabbed her pigtails. Without so much as a wince, she pulled on them and they extended until they were the perfect length.

  “Whoa,” I said. “That’s a very cool trick. I could really use hair like that. You think I could have it installed on me?”

  The robot smiled. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  It only took another minute for the Akiko robot to make the remaining adjustments—an extra inch or two in height, a slight lengthening of the face—needed to transform herself into a perfect match for me. Now she could take my place here on Earth and no one would be the wiser.

  “So where are the others?” I asked her when she was done. “Don’t tell me you came all the way to Earth by yourself.”

  “Oh, no, Akiko. They’re here. They’re up on the roof.”

  “The roof? Of the Fowlerville mall?”

  “That’s right.” She smiled again. “They sent me rather than come down here themselves. Unlike you, they tend to attract quite a lot of attention.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it,” I said. “So what’s going on? Are they here to take me on another adventure?”

  “You could say that,” the robot replied. “Why don’t you go up to the roof and find out for yourself?”

  She didn’t have to ask me twice. I was ready to go.

  “All right, but will you be okay taking my place? My mom’s—”

  “At the Talbots two doors down. Don’t worry. I’ll find her. Just as soon as I finish buying those blue jeans you’re wearing.”
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  “Jeez, you’re good at this,” I said. “It’s starting to get a little scary.”

  She gave me instructions on how to get up to the roof; then I changed back into my own jeans and let myself out of the dressing room. Within minutes I’d made my way down a dimly lit corridor in the back of the mall I’d never set foot in before, opened a door marked DO NOT OPEN! ALARM WILL SOUND! (the alarm had been deactivated by the Akiko robot), and climbed a ladder that was intended strictly for electricians and the people who clean the skylights.

  I opened a door in the ceiling at the top of the ladder and pulled myself up onto the roof. It was windy and blindingly bright. A seagull squawked overhead and a gigantic air conditioner buzzed a few yards away, but otherwise it was fairly quiet. There was nothing much to see.

  Until I turned and looked behind me.

  There, no more than fifty feet away, stood a big, gleaming, white and yellow …

  … well, it was a high-tech intergalactic train. There isn’t any other way to put it. It had three separate passenger cars, a sort of locomotive-type thing at the front, and a flatbed luggage section at the back piled high with packages and suitcases. It had no wheels, which was a good thing, since there certainly wasn’t any railroad track up there on the roof of the Fowlerville mall.

  Through the black-tinted windows I could just make out the silhouettes of passengers. I’d seen a lot of weird aliens in my time, but some of these guys looked seriously freaky. One of them had heads where his hands should have been, and another had eyes the size of basketballs. Every car was humming quietly, momentarily cooling its jets. A strangely clean smell hung in the air, more like disinfectant than spent fuel.

  PING

  An electronic bell sounded and a door slid silently open at the back of the third passenger car. Out jumped Mr. Beeba and Spuckler, followed by Gax and Poog. I was so happy to see them I was practically dancing.

  “’Kiko!” shouted Spuckler as he bounded from the train to my side in three big strides, his blue-black hair flopping around behind him and his peg leg ch-chucking every time it struck the roof. In a flash he scooped me up and gave me the biggest, stinkiest bear hug of my life, with no apparent intention of ever putting me back down. Stinky or not, it was the hug I’d been waiting ages for.

  Not to be outdone, Mr. Beeba greeted me with sweeping gestures of his big yellow-gloved hands and a couple of long, fancy sentences, each packed with as many words as he could fit in.

  “Truly it is an unalloyed blessing to be in your presence again, my dear. I do hope you can find it in your heart to grant us forgiveness for having failed to arrange a rendezvous with you at an earlier date.”

  “I’ll definitely forgive you, Mr. Beeba,” I replied with a wink, “as soon as I figure out what you just said.”

  A string of high-pitched gurgly syllables erupted beside my left ear. There was Poog hovering next to me, his purple skin glimmering in the afternoon sunlight. It was so great to see him again! I felt half ready to do some floating of my own.

  “Poog says he hopes you’re feeling well,” said Mr. Beeba. “We’ve got some strenuous activity ahead of us in the days to come.”

  “Now that you’re all here,” I said, “I’ve never felt better.”

  “NOR HAVE WE, MA’AM,” said Gax, rocking happily back and forth on his squeaky old wheels, his head cocked to one side on his spindly mechanical neck. “SORRY IF WE INTERRUPTED YOU IN THE MIDDLE OF SOMETHING IMPORTANT.”

  “Believe me, Gax. No kid has ever been in more desperate need of a nice big interruption than I am right now.”

  “What’s the problem, ’Kiko?” asked Spuckler. “Bullies pickin’ on ya? You just point ’em out to me and I’ll treat ’em all to a nice big sock in th’ jaw.”

  “No bullies, Spuckler. Just boredom. You guys have any idea how long it’s been since I had any fun?”

  “Well, that’s all about to change, my dear,” said Mr. Beeba, gesturing toward the gleaming space train behind him. “For this is the Zarga Baffa Astroshuttle, a special form of interstellar transport reserved exclusively for—”

  FZIIIIT

  A window slid open at the front of the locomotive and a very weird head popped out. It had about a dozen housefly eyeballs and a snout like a miniature rhinoceros.

  “Ig! Ig!” it said from a mouth I couldn’t see. “Ig-f ’-griddle-gick!”

  “Oh, dear,” said Mr. Beeba, taking me by the arm. “It seems we’re putting the conductor behind schedule. We’d better get on board before he makes good on his threat to leave us behind.”

  We all piled into the third passenger car as quickly as we could. I got one last glimpse of the mall’s roof before the door slid shut and the Zarga Baffa Astroshuttle rose noiselessly into the air.

  Chapter 2

  There wasn’t space to breathe, let alone sit down. Mr. Beeba instructed me to grab hold of a metallic strap hanging from the ceiling, and I did so just in time to steady myself as the vessel began to pick up speed. On the other side of the windows Fowlerville fell away, and soon we were up above the clouds, gaining mile upon mile of altitude with each passing second.

  “So what’s the mission this time?” I asked Mr. Beeba.

  “It’s not a mission,” Mr. Beeba replied. “It’s something much better than that. King Froptoppit has this day bestowed upon us an honor unlike any other. We are to join the others in this vessel as the newest class of students enrolled in the Intergalactic Space Patrollers Training Camp on Zarga Baffa.”

  “A training camp?” I said. “Cool. What kind of stuff are they going to teach us there?”

  “THE ZARGA BAFFA TRAINING METHOD IS SHROUDED IN MYSTERY,” said Gax. “GRADUATES ARE INSTRUCTED NOT TO DESCRIBE IT IN DETAIL. BUT THEY SAY SOME EXERCISES INVOLVE VERY REAL LIFE-OR-DEATH SITUATIONS: LASER BATTLES AGAINST HORRIBLE MONSTERS, PARACHUTING FROM SPEEDING ROCKET SHIPS …”

  “I dunno about the rest of ya,” said Spuckler, “but I’m mainly in this for the Drugollian kick-boxing lessons. I hear they teach ya moves that’ll bring a whole gang of skazzle-backed bluck beasts to their knees.”

  “Man, this sounds like a pretty wild place,” I said. “So what exactly are space patrollers, anyway? What do they do?”

  “THEY ARE THE FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE AGAINST THE VILLAINS OF THE UNIVERSE,” said Gax. “EVERY PLANET IN THE UNIVERSE NEEDS ITS OWN CREW OF SPACE PATROLLERS TO DEFEND ITSELF AGAINST INTERSTELLAR THIEVES AND BANDITS. SADLY, THE PLANET SMOO HAS NEVER HAD SUCH A CREW.”

  “Dreadful bad luck,” said Mr. Beeba. “King Froptoppit has sent many a band of would-be space patrollers to Zarga Baffa, only to have all of them rejected prior to graduation. The last group he sent did so poorly the training masters of Zarga Baffa said they could accept no further trainees from Smoo. King Froptoppit prevailed upon them for one last chance. We,” he added with a raised finger, “are that last chance.”

  “Wow,” I said. “There’s a lot riding on this.”

  “I’ll say there is,” said Mr. Beeba. “If we fail to become certified space patrollers, King Froptoppit’s disappointment will be beyond words. Indeed, the entire population of Smoo is counting on us.”

  I glanced at Poog. He was smiling proudly, confident in our chances of success. There was a trace of nervousness in his eyes, though, as if he knew the road ahead would be long and hard.

  “Well, we can’t let King Froptoppit down,” I said, clapping my hands together. “I mean, come on, we’ve been through some pretty bad scrapes, the five of us. We’re as ready to be space patrollers as anyone else in this ship.”

  I glanced around at our fellow passengers. Immediately to my left was a yellow-green guy with a tiny head and three beady eyes. He had arms that hung all the way down to the floor, looped around a few times, then crisscrossed up to his face, where they turned the pages of a small book: judging from the illustration on the cover, it was a how-to guide for a long-armed brand of kung fu. He didn’t make a sound, but he pried his eyes away from his book long enough
to shoot me a glance that said “Who you lookin’ at?”

  I turned my attention to a passenger standing just behind me. She—well, she looked like a she, anyway—was about two feet tall, with spiky green hair and a tiny pink-lipsticked mouth. She was dressed in a red leather suit with a see-through space helmet over her head, and was scrawling notes on a pad of paper as she watched a series of grainy images flash by on a nearby video monitor.

  “So these are the other trainees, right?” I said to Mr. Beeba. “Looks like they’re just as determined to graduate as we are.”

  “But of course,” said Mr. Beeba. “Official space patroller status is a distinction coveted by people all across the universe, from royals on the moons of Glissflik to peasants on the rings of Smaturn.”

  “Don’t you mean the rings of Saturn?” I said.

  Mr. Beeba’s face twitched a bit, then settled into a frown. “I meant what I said, Akiko. Smaturn is a densely populated planet in the Zoodi galaxy, whereas the planet of which you are speaking is entirely uninhabited.” He snorted loudly. “But maybe you know something I don’t,” he added, signaling with his eyes that I definitely didn’t.

  I gazed out the windows as we zoomed across the sea of stars, then examined the faces of our fellow passengers, one at a time. Some looked excited, others looked scared, but one thing’s for sure: no one looked bored.

  Something Mr. Beeba had said echoed in my head. “The entire population of Smoo is counting on us.” I imagined ordinary Smoovian families in their homes, anxiously waiting for word from Zarga Baffa. I pictured King Froptoppit pacing the floors of his palace, wondering if we would succeed or fail.

  We can’t mess this up, I thought. We’ve got to graduate from this training camp. No matter what it takes.

  Chapter 3

  A few hours later we arrived on the planet Zarga Baffa. It was big and not quite round: like a pyramid with its edges rubbed smooth. As we approached, the passengers tapped their claws and tentacles on the windows and chattered among themselves. One fish-eyed alien worked herself up into such a frenzy she nearly fainted. I felt like the only one on board who hadn’t been dreaming of this moment for years. Still, I was excited. I couldn’t wait for our first lesson to begin.