Lora Jett and the Candy Factory: Part 3

 Alan climbed down the nearest stairwell, which now caught the golem’s attention. It took a huge swing of its right arm at the catwalk, and as its hand slapped against the metal grating, the hot chocolate suddenly hardened around its surface. Fortunately, Alan was already on the ground, and he hid behind a metal pillar, waiting for the diversion.

 Lora informed her daughter, “Let’s put that Scooby-Doo plan on the back burner and do something more direct.”

 “Like what?”

 “Like...” Lora stopped to stand right next to the main tank. She stretched up and shouted, “Hey, over here!”

 The golem almost immediately turned around, more quickly than Lora expected. He swiped at the human gum strand, but Lora stretched back to normal in the nick of time. Simultaneously, Alan had grown to 14 feet high and jabbed the back of the golem’s head with the side of his left hand. Alan noticed how the impact heavily cracked the hard caramel shell over that surface, and it quickly reformed back into one solid piece. The golem turned back around at that moment and tried to punch Alan in the face. Noticing that because this creature was standing inside the vat of the chocolate it came from, it had no legs. So Alan took the advantage, leaned back – inadvertently breaking the catwalk in two – and kicked the golem in its groin. He could hear a low, hollow-sounding moan coming from it. Even though that made that thing tilt back like a bop bag, Alan realized his mistake: That kick had caused his left foot to get stuck in the gooey mass of chocolate and caramel. Hastily, Alan reached for the button on his belt and willed himself to shrink to normal size again, but in doing so, Alan noticed two things:

    1.  Apparently the energy field this belt generated had a limit to the mass of any surrounding object, as the golem didn’t change size with him, which was a good thing in this case.

    2.  He still remained stuck in the area where his huge foot left a print. And because of that, he was now dangling about 6 feet off the floor, almost flailing from the dizzying effect.

The giant of candy bars laughed, then drove his fist into Alan’s now puny self, leaving the man coated in chocolate so molten it almost burned his costume.

-----

 Back on the floor, Lora and Mindy were confused as to what was going on.

 Lora started, “Looks like Alan’s in trouble! We’d better help him!”

 “But where is he?” Mindy asked.

 Her mom stretched up towards the golem for a better look, but she gasped in horror, not only at the fact that Alan was still glued to its chest, but that the golem was now forming legs and preparing to leave the chocolate mixer! With two pounding strides, the creature was free. Lora could see much of the workers running away and locking themselves into control booths or offices.

 Noticing that the chocolate golem was marching towards another of the manufacturing bays, Lora took the initiative, glued her feet to a nearby pipe leading to another machine, and stretched her body across the floor, forming a tripwire of rubber and bubblegum.

 But the chocolate golem noticed this, grabbed the line before reaching it, and, in an extremely bizarre act, started chewing Lora’s gummy body. Words could not describe her feelings of experiencing something like that, except that it was a dozen times worse than the same event some years back, being chewed by Mindy.

 Speaking of whom, the little girl had been watching, saw this, and yelled, “Hey! Don’t eat my mom!”

 But not only did the dripping hot humanoid ignore her, a loud roar echoed from elsewhere in the factory. Charging through the room, damaging equipment and sending containers flying, was another candy creature: A Stegosaurus made of multiple types of hard candy, all arranged in sharp-looking forms over its body, and creating a very thick natural armor. The golem looked down at the creature, made some hand signals, and then pointed in Mindy’s direction.

 On her own, Double Mindy had to think of a plan: Take down this candy dinosaur and rescue her uncle and mother in the process. In order to do that, she’d need more than one person, and so she tapped into her latent cloning powers and split into a team of six; Clones 4-6 opted to take on the monster, while the real Mindy and clones 1 and 2 would rescue their teammates.

-----

 The fighting team stood in a half circle, and the center one, clone 5, shouted, “Come here, you big bully!” Then they all charged upon the creature.

 The Stegosaurus’ eyes narrowed, and suddenly it coughed something out of its throat: A jawbreaker the size of a bowling ball! If this were a cartoon on TV, Mindy would have been laughing, but being the target was not funny in the slightest. The nigh-unbreakable candy sphere rolled straight towards the trio. While clones 4 and 6 jumped away, clone 5 was “bowled” over and left flat on the floor.

 Clone 4 stretched onto the creature’s back and, thinking about what it was made of, proceeded to chip off its hard candy armor using two makeshift pickaxes. The stegosaurus screamed in pain and stomped side to side, making the floor shake as if trod upon by an elephant, and several processing vats rattled, making some of their products spill onto the floor. The chiseling process was exhaustive for the little girl, and clone 6 was busy helping clone 5 back to normal. She had to open a tiny hole on clone 5’s surface and blow into it, inflating her back to normal shape.

 But the safety was short-lived when the stegosaurus stomped twice and shot out more jawbreakers at rapid speed, almost like tank shells. Then clone 5 got a bright idea: She wrapped her arms around two pipes horizontally across from each other, had clone 6 pull back 5’s body, and effectively create the classic elastic girl slingshot. Just as those melt-in-your-mouth projectiles came within inches of clone 5, clone 6 released the slingshot and directed the jawbeakers right back at that candy dinosaur. They impacted it in such a way that the inertia made deep cracks in the creature’s armor, if it was armor.

 Clones 5 and 6 noticed that this attack had stunned the stegosaurus, but, judging by its twitching eyes, that definitely would not last long. At this point, clone 4 was tired out, but about 3 feet of surface area was broken off, including several spines in its back. Clone 4 collapsed to the floor in a heap of tired ribbons, but clone 6 told her, “Don’t go to sleep, it’s getting back up!”

-----

 Meanwhile, the other 3 Mindies were busy taking care of the golem. Mindy herself had gone for its head by stretching in a snakelike fashion up to the top from behind. The golem didn’t even see it coming because of how occupied its low-intelligence mind was with its task at hand: Bringing out a third monster.

 Mindy tried to think of a way to make it spit Lora out. Coaxing it with her minty skin would be a bad idea, because then she would be chewed on as well. Then she remembered something from a Disney movie, formed a giant clothespin from her hands, and clamped it around the golem’s nose. Holding strong to keep it in place, Mindy waited for a precious 10 seconds for that creature to be on the way to sneezing. With a few held back breaths, Mindy released her clasp, and the walking candy bar let off a mighty sneeze that not only expelled Lora’s gummy body, but coated it in chocolate, and shook Alan who was still clinging to the golem’s waist, only inches from the genderless crotch.

 Up on a catwalk with a better vantage point, Clone 1 grabbed onto clone 2’s ankles, and the latter person stretched down to where Mindy’s uncle happened to be. She could see him struggling to break free, but to no avail. He was nearly drowning in molten chocolate. Trying to think of a way to break him out, Clone 2 reached out to her uncle and asked him to take her hands. Alan could just manage to grab them by only a few inches in the sticky substance. Then clone 1 morphed her body into a pulley mechanism – an impressive feat of shapeshifting at that – and started winding clone 2 back by the legs. It took a lot of straining, but the pulling process eventually freed Alan from the hot dark mess of candy. The golem took this as an itch and grabbed Alan in its right hand. Then, with its left hand, it started jabbing Alan with one finger and almost crushed his bones from the impact. But as the golem continued walking, Alan noticed that they were passing beneath another catwalk. Alan thought fast and grabbed onto its handrail with some difficulty. The hand was much less sticky than its torso, so Alan could safely break free. Then he found Lora glued to the wall. Looking down, he saw Mindy calling all her clones back and stretching up to this walkway. Together, they peeled Lora Jett’s gummy mass off that wall, and she promptly reformed back into her gleaming red self.

 “Wow, these things are tough! How are we going to take them all down?” Alan explained in a nearly out-of-breath voice.

 “Yeah, I’m tired from all that work, Uncle Alan!” Mindy whined.

 “Aside from the fact that I’ll probably be off chocolate for a month...I don’t know. Those guys are...dumber than I thought! That chocolate man ate me instead of falling for the wire trap!”

 “Maybe it was because...well, you are made of bubble gum, and he saw you as that.”

 “Talk about a weakness.”

 “Hey, look at that!” Mindy shouted while pointing around a corner. The two adults followed and peered around so that only their heads would be seen. Down below on the empty factory floor stood the golem and candy stegosaurus, which, by the looks of Mindy’s damage, had tiny pieces crumbling off as it walked; both those creatures were walking like automatons to a third manufacturing bay on the right side of the cavernous chamber. This one, designated by a sign, was “Bay 6: Jelly processing”. The two monsters shook a huge vat with a pipe inside. Bizarrely, the shaking jarred a blob of red gelatin loose from the pipe, and it oozed on its own out of the vat to join the two other monsters.

 “Crap, another one?! What are we going to do now?” Lora groaned.

 “What about that Scooby-Doo plan of yours?” Alan suggested.

 Lora tried to remember what she formulated earlier, anxious because the three monsters were now advancing towards the catwalk the heroes stood on. Then an invisible light bulb popped up in her head, and Lora explained, “Okay, here’s what we do: Mindy, you try to distract those things. Make as many clones as possible and try to be creative with your powers. Okay?”

 “Got it, Mom!” Mindy vigorously nodded.

 “Alan, grow large and try to find some large items to trap those creatures.”

 He looked at the factory floor, and scanned for anything useful. Then his eyes popped open under his mask when he spotted several glaring objects: A pressing device that looked similar to a trash compactor, and an empty, unused mixing tank.

 Lora continued, “And Mindy, the way we’ll create a distraction is where Scooby-Doo comes in: We’ll play Shaggy and Scooby, and try to fool one of those creatures somehow. I’ll make it up as we go along. Then I’ll be live bait, if it works out, and lure those things to their...fate, if you know what I mean.”

 Everyone waited for the creatures to move into an appropriate position, then Lora shouted, “GO!” and the trio initiated their plan.

------

 Alan turned on his belt again and grew to a 14-foot height once more, but this time ran to the left and grabbed the empty vat – trying his best to safely unhook it from the connections, and slammed it down over the golem. It tried to push against the giant bucket, but didn’t have enough room to move around without changing shape, and from what they’d seen him do before, that golem didn’t look capable of doing that.

 Then Alan brought his fists down on the stegosaurus multiple times, fingers locked together in one ball. Smashing it over and over brought deeper cracks and consecutively larger bits flying off, all while that dinosaur screeched in pain. But, again taking the hero by surprise, the creature spat out more jawbreakers that to Alan were like marbles. Because of how they rolled across the floor where he stood, Alan slipped and just had time to shrink back to normal height before hitting the ground, hard.

 The girls, meanwhile, were putting their distraction plan in motion. Mindy and a few clones were teasing the blob of red jelly. Alan tried to help by jabbing it from behind and make it think that was a pinch, but the sheer inertia of running at it caused the man to bounce off its surface and crash into a pile of boxes. Likewise, Lora thought of an idea of inflating her body inside the creature, but running towards it also caused her to bounce backwards and land in a pile of sugar on the floor. An indent of her body was left behind, and she scoffed, “Classy.”

 However, her Scooby-Doo plan was saved for was the golem. She noticed that he was melting into one solid column of chocolate and forcing the vat off of himself. Lora asked Mindy over and instructed her to morph into a factory worker’s guise, color and everything, which her mom also did. Spotting a boxing machine near the back of the chamber, Lora made up a cheesy line, “Say, Mindy, looks like we have some candy that needs sorting, don’t you think?”

 “Sure does! Let’s go check on it!” Mindy agreed.

 They hustled towards the towering man of caramel and chocolate, and started using measuring tape made from their gummy bodies, then Lora told him, “Excuse me, sir, but it looks like you have some candy that we need to sort. Could you move over to that machine and drop them inside, please?” and the golem looked towards what seemed to be a giant funnel leading into the packing machine. Following that, Lora tried her tripwire trick again and this time it worked: The golem slipped and fell headfirst into the machine, churned up and split into cubes that filled 6 x 5 x 3’ cardboard boxes.

 Lora and Mindy shared an elastic hi-five, and the former made the punchline, “I think it’s passed inspection!”

 Finally, they took on the gummy-blob. Mindy played bait and tricked the eyeless creature towards the molding device. Mindy ran right up next to the giant mold, then ran to the right, but before the blob could follow, it tipped and rolled in like the Flubber creature. Then Alan helped out – having run across the factory floor the entire time – by activating the machine. The red shiny creature writhed in the 4-walled chamber, but it was too late as the overhead press descended slowly upon it. The gel overflowed and tried to reform back into its original shape, but the girls thought ahead and formed into another square mold to trap the creature inside once more. The red and green bin of gum squeezed and tightened around the blob, sealed off with a lid so that it couldn’t leak out again, and when the girls returned to normal shape, a perfectly cuboid shape of jell-o wobbled helplessly on the floor.

 “Woo-hoo! They’re all down!” Lora cheered.

 “Yeah, now we can go see Victor!” Mindy added.

 But the chocolate golem’s imprisonment lasted shorter than they thought, as he burst from the boxes, reformed, and growled an inhuman growl before snatching up all three Jetts. If he spoke coherent English, he would have said something like “That’s it!” or “I’ve had enough!”

-----

 He slammed them to a conveyor belt and coated them all in hot chocolate. The stegosaurus showed its anger as well by plastering them with sharp hard candy, as if to say, “And this is for beating me to death!”

 Nobody could move on the belt; Mindy was scared of what was to come next, and Lora thought, What the hell? We won, didn’t we?

 The intercom rang with some loud feedback, then an unfamiliar male voice spoke, “Well done, my pets.”

 Finally, after a slow trip across the center of the factory floor, the belt delivered them to another section of the factory, sealed off by a massive partition.

 Under the coat of hard chocolate, everyone passed out from an unknown source. A strange man and a female partner set about entrapping the Jetts so that they would not be able to move when waking up. The man placed Mindy and Lora in a taffy puller, while the woman sprayed Alan with hot fudge that eerily froze him in place as it hardened.

 In about half an hour, they awoke, face to face with the culprits behind all this. Lora and Mindy couldn’t get a good look because the taffy puller was on and kept spinning them. Lora recalled Ella from the Omegals mentioning something this happening to her...multiple times.

 Alan, however, could just see out of holes in the hardened chocolate. The woman was one of the factory workers, bearing dirty blond hair, somewhat pale skin, and wearing a blue jumpsuit; the man wore a long purple tunic and had a gold necklace around the collar.

 The man spoke with a thick Jewish accent, “So, this is the Jett trio. I expected someone more resourceful than those simple tricks you performed out there.”

 Lora protested, “What do you want?!”

 “I am Rabbi Alexander, and if you’ve met Mistress Nirvana, you should already know what I want.”

 Thinking over what he meant, Lora’s eyes narrowed, but she couldn’t get her words out due to the dizzying taffy puller. Instead, she shouted, “Turn this blasted thing off before we get wrinkles!”

 Alan, at the same time, struggled to move, and even tapped into his powers again. However, the belt was still on and it changed size with him. Talk about a drawback. He couldn’t press the button because not only was his body frozen, but the button was under this shell of fudge.

 Rabbi Alexander just stood there grinning at the sight, and the woman also chuckled in amusement at this sight. Three superheroes, now reduced to mere candy.

 One thing was for sure: The Jetts wouldn’t be able to get out of this situation on their own.

-----

 Meanwhile, in the administrative section of the facility, the two old people and Victor emerged from behind a desk in Victor’s office.

 “It’s been very quiet, do you think they won?” Sarah inquired.

 “I don’t know, if that was the case they would have come here,” Mr. Hearst pointed out. “Should we go see?”

 “I’m nervous. We could use the surveillance system, though,” Victor suggested.

 He stood up, directed them to a hallway, and showed them an adjacent office marked “Surveillance Room 3”. Two guards were on duty, and Victor asked one of them to scan all the cameras. Sarah and Richard gathered around to see what was on the monitor, and watched as the guard flipped through camera after camera. After several empty scenes snapped by, that guard locked onto one in a certain section with several people in it; zooming in slightly, Sarah gasped at the sight of her children immobilized in that room.

 “Oh my, I never thought I’d see Lora become taffy! And Alan looks like a statue, that must be painful!” Mr. Hearst commented.

 “Who are those two in the foreground, though?” Sarah asked.

 Victor turned to the guard and told him, “Mr. Castillo, run a staff database scan on those two people.”

 His fingers danced on the keyboard in a few commands, and the cursor tapped some buttons to open up an ID program. Several profiles with photos zipped by, and the scan turned up two things: The woman in the blue jumpsuit was Teresa Ryder, an employee of this company, who was on the facility’s maintenance team. Perhaps that explained how the power went off in only three bays. The one who had identified himself as Rabbi Alexander had no match in the database, but his clothes were certainly out of place.

 “Why does that man in the purple robe look familiar?” Mr. Hearst asked.

 “I recognize that tunic anywhere! He’s a wizard, and I saw a sorceress named Lydia Nirvana with that same kind of pattern in her robe!” Sarah exclaimed.

 “What do we do, then? Call the police?” Victor asked.

 “No, the cops can’t handle magic, he needs to be disarmed,” the old lady deduced from experience.

 “But we have to help them somehow!” Mr. Hearst almost cried.

 “As long as it doesn’t look like a DEUS EX MACHINA, I think you’re right,” Sarah nodded. She thought for a moment and noted that neither she nor Richard had much strength for combat, then turned to Victor and asked, “Can you send some guards into that room?”

 “Yes, I can,” the bearded executive nodded. He turned to Mr. Castillo and repeated the order, and that guard picked up a phone, tapped a button for a certain line, and in a few minute, adjacent cameras showed 4 security guards on their way down a corridor.

-----

 Teresa shut down the taffy puller and released Alan, but she took his belt, shackled his hands together with a chain, tied the two girls to their chairs with their own elastic limbs, and the Rabbi zapped them in place with a freeze ray from his hands. Then, with a captive audience, Rabbi Alexander finally continued explaining, “First off, I am pleased that you brought justice to your...father.”

 “Yes, he was terrible in more ways than one,” Alan agreed. “But what’s the deal with those monsters?”

 “I want you and your unworthy powers wiped off this poisoned Earth! Even if Lord Nirvana would not accept me into his group, I still must take action! I'd rather take you out in one swift motion, rather than beat around the bush and bait you to me like Lydia,” Alexander paused to breathe deeply and calm down, “And my pets were made to take you out quickly, and they WILL try again, I assure you!”

 “I’ll say this much: We never saw any of this coming, the store I work at just got a shipment from this place and my boss was curious to see,” Lora expressed some impression.

 “All the more to strike when you all were completely unaware, my friend,” Alexander smiled.

 “Why are you in on this, lady?” Alan asked with frustration.

 “Me? I’m the one who cut the power so Alex could do his thing. I am on the maintenance team, after all. I hear that if I do the job right, he’ll grant me some of his powers.”

 “Typical. As if a professional criminal wasn’t enough,” Lora scoffed.

 Alan asked a question that was rather religiously inappropriate, “So, Rabbi, were you not allowed into the Order of the Raven because you’re Jewish?”

 Angered, Alexander brandished a staff and fired a blue bolt of energy at Alan’s head, electrocuting him for a few seconds. “How dare you speak ill of my religion! I had enough ridicule from them!”

 All of a sudden, a door burst open, and several security guards appeared, with pistols in hand. One of them yelled, “Freeze!”

 Teresa yanked out a switchblade and pointed it at the guards. “Stay back, or I’ll kill you all!”

 “Put down that knife, Ryder! You should be arrested for carrying such a weapon!” That guard yelled.

 Just as Rabbi Alexander charged up his staff, the guards fired their pistols. At the last minute, the staff generated a blue energy field that caused the bullets to ricochet in all directions, some towards the captive heroes. One of them bounced against Alan’s cheek, barely avoiding making a gash.

 He struggled against the chains keeping his wrists bound to the chair; All of a sudden, he felt something sharp in his suit pocket, reached inside as best he could by turning his bottom 45 degrees counterclockwise, and found a sharp piece of rock candy left over from the stegosaurus. He jammed it into one of the tiny links of the chain, banged the flat end of the piece against the back of the chair to force it further inside, and after several attempts, the chain snapped apart, freeing Alan even though the broken halves still dangled from his wrists.

 Seeing as Teresa was occupied with the guards, Rabbi Alexander saw Alan and held one hand out with fingers outstretched. He smiled, and began twisting them like a spider’s limbs. Alan fell to the floor and writhed in burning pain that he found to be coming from his back. “What’s going on?!” he gasped.

 Alexander laughed, “If there’s one thing I know about the Order of the Raven, mandalas are a very useful tool. How handy that I heard Miss Nirvana had already etched one on your back.”

 “Lora, help!” Alan cried.

 Two of the guards noticed that because the Rabbi was occupied with torturing his victim, and the third had already pinned down Teresa, those guards grabbed him by the shoulders, and one of them pointed his gun to his neck.

 “I don’t know what it is, but stop doing that to the man, or you’re going to get one through the neck!” he growled.

 Noticing that the burning pain stopped while that man with the gun kept Alexander occupied, Alan took the chance and scrambled quietly to the two chairs where Lora and Mindy were restrained by ice and their own limbs, “Hurry, Alan! I can’t feel my arms from the elbow down!”

 “I can’t smash the ice, it’ll shatter! It’ll take an hour at most to thaw!”

 “What else is there, then?”

 Thinking for a second, Alan suggested, “Did you try severing yourself from the ice? Shapeshifters can always re-grow anything lost.”

 Lora’s eyes popped open wide, and she remarked, “Wow, I never thought of that, and that’s coming from the daughter of a man who knows comic books like the dictionary! Derp!”

 The elastic mom concentrated on cutting off the frozen segment of her tied arms and legs, envisioning a tiny crack between the two that grew wider and wider while the connecting strand shrank. Then with a thud on the floor, the frozen part of her fell away, leaving her with mere stumps where her hands and feet would be. She swiftly reformed those with imagination itself, then, after some reassurance, used a knife formed from her left hand to cut off Mindy’s frozen parts. Now the trio was back and ready to fight once more.

 “Yo, Alex! Guess who’s back?” Alan shouted to get the Rabbi’s attention.

 After wrestling the guard away, Alexander whipped about, eyes narrow with anger at the sight of their freedom. Alan noticed his staff charging up again, and now distant stomping footsteps echoed from what sounded like the main processing room outside.

 “We have to get that staff! Maybe we could control the golems that way!” He ordered the girls.

 “What’s the plan, Uncle Alan?” Mindy quipped.

 Smirking, Alan suggested, “Try playing a game of...whatever it is when someone says, ‘I’m here, no over here’, et cetera. That’ll get the Rabbi frustrated long enough. Lora, tie up Teresa in rubber so the guards can take care of her, and I’ll get the staff.”

 “But even if you do, can you control it? You’re not Yen Sid or anything,” Lora warned him.

 “I’ll think of something, but let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. Now let’s do this!”

-----

 The Jetts lined themselves up in a battle-ready pose, then broke away to start the fight. Mindy put on her goofiest personality, and jumped around calling to Rabbi Alexander to come get her. Attempting to run in wherever Mimdy seemed to be, the girl bounced to another spot before he could turn under the heavy robe. He growled in frustration and yelled, “Stop playing games, little girl!”

 Not getting the expression, Mindy replied, “But I’m having too much fun with this game!”

 For Teresa who was already cutting one of the guard’s uniforms, Lora stood behind her, glued both arms together, leaned back, and turned her body into one giant sheet that unrolled like a paper towel roll on its side, creating a shiny red and pink blanket made of rubber. With concentration, the sheet wrapped around Teresa like a tortilla, then Lora severed the shape and returned to normal form.

 Piece of cake, Lora thought to herself.  I really need to practice my skills next week. I feel like I don’t have enough potential yet.

 Finally, with Rabbi Alexander enraged with Mindy’s continuous meddling, Alan found his belt lying behind one of the boxes, and turned on the belt’s energy field generator - wary that the power indicator was red, showing that the internal battery would have to be recharged very soon. Next, with the field a-crackling over his costume, Alan grabbed the staff without the Rabbi noticing, and shrank to about 3 feet tall, then ran off through an open door and returned to normal size. Hiding under a set of stairs, Alan looked at the staff, closed his eyes, and whispered to himself, “Come on, how did he do it? Do I just say what the command is?” He tried speaking to the staff, “Hear me, creatures of candy. The Rabbi is your enemy, destroy him and you shall be rewarded!”

 Surprisingly, the staff glowed again with an intense blue light, and now, as Alan opened the door again, he saw the chocolate golem, in front of the other two, pulling a roll door up and charging towards Rabbi Alexander.

 “What?! How could you turn on your master? I order you to--” His sentence was cut short as he realized the staff was missing.

 “Looking for this, Rabbi?” Alan called out while waving the staff side to side.

 Before Rabbi Alexander could run towards Alan Jett, the chocolate golem made some hand motions to the blob of jelly and stegosaurus, and everyone watched with glee as the creatures took him down: The candy-armored dinosaur grabbed Alexander in his mouth, then forced him into the red blob, leaving him trapped in the viscous substance.

 However, the Rabbi had one last trick up his sleeve. Just before his right hand dipped below the surface, a bolt of purple light flew from it and struck Teresa, her eyes turned that color, and she started moving like a robot with that knife still in her right hand. The candy monsters retreated from the chamber, with Alexander still floating in red gummy stuff, and, with no other commands, simply returned to the manufacturing machines they originated in, becoming lifeless and non-sentient masses in just a matter of minutes.

 Seeing that she was in a hypnotic trance, Alan tried to deactivate the spell with the staff, but the fact that the knife was so close to his head; Alan ducked out of the way, threw the staff across the room and dived to the floor, a few feet away from that rod.

 Teresa tried repeatedly swiping at him with the switchblade like the murderer in Psycho, not losing accuracy by any percentage because of her trance.

 Alan screamed, “Help!” realizing that the belt was now completely drained so that he could not change size, and even if he took it off and used his own powers directly, the shock of being attacked with a knife was too much to do it under.

 The girls saw what was going on, and they worked together to get that staff to Alan and hold down the hypnotized woman. The guards, who were still present – with one needing first aid from his injuries, didn’t fire because of how she acted like an automaton.

 Lora melted into a blob of bubble gum, bounced across the floor a few times, and completely enveloped Teresa to try and stick her in place. At the same time, Mindy split off a clone to carry the huge staff with help, and brought it to her uncle in the nick of time.

 Forgoing any incantations, Alan just shouted in hope that a simple command would work, “Teresa, awaken!”

 But the sentence failed. He tried again with other phrases, like ‘wake up’, ‘return to your true self’, and even ‘un-entrance’. Getting frustrated, he finally tried a spell he heard in a movie, “Finite Incantatem!” and to his surprise, that actually worked, as she stopped moving like a robot and her eyes changed back to their green color.

 Lora released her cocooning grip and reformed back to normal. Dazed, Teresa asked, “Whoa, what happened?”

 “You uh...got your reward, and it wasn’t pleasant,” Alan lied.

 Victor, Sarah and Richard arrived from the stairwell in the next room, and Sarah cried in joy, “You did it, kids! We saw everything on camera!”

 “Yeah, but the--” Lora started before Victor cut her off, “Don’t worry, Security has that man under custody. I think he almost suffocated before drowning in Jell-O.”

 “But he’ll need some special treatment – that Rabbi Alexander knows magic, with or without this staff of his,” Alan explained while showing the long rod of aged wood.

 “I can figure something out, we have special contacts,” Sarah explained in a subtle way.

 “As for Miss Ryder, I think she’s innocent, but we’ll have to tighten security, that’s for sure,” Victor continued.

 Richard interrupted, “So, eh...I guess the tour’s over?”

 Lora, having morphed back to her civilian self, answered, “I’d say with everything that’s happened, the tour probably is over. But I feel like we deserve an award for stopping a huge disaster!”

 Victor rubbed his beard for a moment, then said, “You’re right, um...Lora. Hmm...what could be fitting...I know that your store distributing my brilliant candies is already a great thing, but...Ah! I know!”

 “What?” Mindy asked – still in her hero form.

 “I’ll give you a special case of every product I’ve designed – even some that hasn’t hit the shelves yet! And it’s 9 groups of 12, which means you’ll have enough for the next week or two! I’ll have it sent outside to take home with you.”

 “Well...I would say no thanks, but because they taste so good, I’m up for that!” Lora smiled.

 “And I’ll be sure to set a good price for the stuff that already goes to my store,” Richard added.

-----

 As they neared the lobby and its exit, Alan finished, “Thanks a lot for this tour, even if we got sidetracked.”

 “Sidetracked? If you hadn’t stopped those monsters this factory would have been smashed to bits!” Victor argued. The purple-suited man paused to look at Lora’s slender figure, then suddenly eyed her abdomen and smirked, “By the way, Lora, you have a very nice navel.”

 She gulped at having never heard something like that, even when on duty, but kept her honesty and replied, “Um...thanks?”

 Victor prepared to ask a question related to pregnancy, but caught himself and just smiled.

 Alan helped load the wide, flat box of candy into the trunk of his sister’s Camaro, Sarah and Mr. Hearst returned to the Corolla, and Victor Lineman, along with some of the other staff, bid them goodbye and the cars sped off towards Centropolis once more.

-----

 It was around 2 AM when they returned to Alan’s apartment.

 Lora sat on the bench next to her brother and discussed future plans, “I have some ideas for what we could do this week, but could do without missions for at least a couple of days.”

 “What do you have in mind, sis?”

 “First: I’d like to see the details of a finished dollhouse up close, which means shrinking WITH you.”

 “That doesn’t sound too hard – at least compared to the work I’ll have to do to get it there. However, I’ll have to recharge this belt first. And to be honest, I would like some help in actually placing the interior features.”

 “I guess me and Mindy could do that, as long as it’s not too strenuous.”

 “Anything else?”

 “And I’d like some kind of session that me and Mindy can take to practice our shapeshifting talents. I’ve noticed that we haven’t been stretching or morphing as efficiently as we could be. Feels like how some of those heroes hardly do anything to their full potential on TV...like Ben Tennyson and his faulty watch.”

 “Hmm...we’ll need to find someplace vacant and not attracting attention from the public. Mom and I will work on that tomorrow.”

 “Thanks,” Lora paused to give him a hug, “I love you, bro, and I’m glad you’re always willing to help out the team. I was amazed at how determined you were during that fight back at the factory.”

 “I was, wasn’t I? Well, I am the brains of this trio,” Alan almost bragged as he stood up. He walked towards the freight elevator, looked back as his sister returned to her car and Sarah joined her son, and Lora called, “G’night, Alan!” before driving off.

 Arriving more exhausted than ever, and collapsing onto the bed for a few minutes before doing her night procedures, Lora suddenly melted into a slather of gum from sheer exhaustion.

 A thought ran through her mind: Man, I really do need some practice.