In Which Kaitey Oliver Learns Quite A Few Things About the Slightly Sordid Past of Her People
an excerpt

"I really really really hate you," Kaitey Oliver informed her friend Dean Celik.

They were parked by the side of the road-- more like stopped, because the car was definitely not working any more. There was smoke billowing ominously from the engine, which did not make either Kaitey or Dean feel very good about things.

"It's not my fault!" Dean protested, taking the key out of the ignition before unbuckling his seat belt and opening the driver side door of the Volkswagon Beetle that Travis Gazule had given them to drive back in Zap.

"You're the one driving!" Kaitey retorted, unbuckling her own seat belt and opening her own door to get out of the car. She and Dean met around the back of the car, where the smoke was billowing black and smokey and billowingly. They stood there for a moment, trying not to inhale any of the black and nasty smoke, before they realized that neither of them had popped the hood open to see what was going on in the engine.

"Go pop the hood latch," Kaitey ordered Dean. He scrambled to do so, but as he did Kaitey wondered at the wisdom of opening the hood of the car with smoke like that billowing so darkly out of the engine. For all they knew the engine might be on fire. Opening it in that state would just make things worse, or so she assumed.

But it was too late-- the hood popped open an inch or so and Kaitey automatically went for the latch to open it the rest of the way. She opened it up and then had to leap backwards as the engine flared up with flame and smoke and other bad smells.

"Dean!" she screeched. "This is all your fault! You have to explain to Travis what happened to his stupid car!"

"It's not my fault!" Dean insisted. "It just happened!"

"What just happened? You drove too fast and ran the stupid thing into the ground! You get to tell Travis!"

"I'm sorry!"

It was two years after Kaitey and Dean had first met. Kaitey was now thirteen, and Dean was now fourteen. They had only just left the city of Zap, where they had saved the town from Alisa Beatrix Ware and her evil plan to take over the world. After they had saved the town and all the other worlders had disappeared one by one, Kaitey and Dean had decided to stick around and help the people of the city of Zap reconstruct their small town in the state of North Dakota. Reconstruction had taken about twelve months after the expulsion of Alisa B Ware, and they had only just finished the final touches. Communication had been returned to Zap, buildings were completely repaired, the police system was in place, businesses were up and running again, and all the stores were stocked and ready to go.

About a week after everything was going relatively smoothly again, Kaitey Oliver and Dean Celik decided it was time to get back to their adventure. Actually, to be more specific, Travis Gazule had noticed a week after reconstruction was complete that Kaitey was getting progressivly more irritable because she had been off her mission for so long. So Travis pulled the Volkswagon Beetle that he affectionately called Sally out of his small black leather wallet and gave it to Dean and Kaitey to get the heck out of Zap and finish their adventure.

At first Kaitey and Dean wanted Travis to go with them, but he insisted on staying in Zap and making sure that nothing bad happened in the town again. He gave them a very long explanation about how cities that had been under seige once were usually targeted again, no matter how well they were fixed up. He told them they should just watch anime-- Tokyo got destroyed at least once a day by their clock, he told them. Kaitey thought it was rather silly of the Japanese people to always talk about destroying their most popular city. In any case, after a great deal of discussion, Kaitey and Dean accepted the fact that Travis would not be joining them on the rest of their adventure.

While they were in Zap, helping with the reconstruction, Dean took driving lessons from who ever would teach him in their spare time. Needless to say, he got a rather spotty and inconsistent understanding of how cars were supposed to be driven. Also, he never got full instruction in how standard engines were to be treated, so Kaitey was very concerned when the Volkswagon Beetle that Travis provided for them to use was a standard engine. She was right to worry, because they only got about thirty miles out side the city limits of Zap before the car was smoking black and billowing smoke. Of course now it was in flames.

Dean joined Kaitey where she stood now, several feet away from the flaming Volkswagon Beetle. Kaitey was glad that she had kept her largish black purse slung over her shoulder, because if she had not, it would still be in the flaming Volkswagon Beetle.

"I seriously hope Travis didn't want this car back," Kaitey muttered mostly to herself.

Dean gave her a wounded look. "I said I was sorry! It was my first time driving standard!"

Kaitey shook her head, wishing she could contradict him somehow. But she felt at that point that Dean had been yelled at enough. There was nothing left to be done about the Volkswagon Beetle that Travis called Sally, and Dean felt bad enough already. So she turned away from the small burning vehicle and looked around them. There was nothing nearby that was in any particular danger of catching fire, but she thought that they probably ought to wait around for the flames to die down, just in case a grass fire started. She told Dean that they were going to watch until the car burned itself out.

"Don't you have anything in your bag that could help?" Dean asked hopefully. Kaitey considered for a moment, then unslung her purse from her shoulder and unzipped the top. She dug around in her purse for a while, her arm submerged deeper into the purse than it really ought to have been allowed, given the size of the purse. After searching for a few seconds, Kaitey came up with nothing.

"No," she said, pulling her arm out and zipping the purse closed again, "I forgot to grab that fire extinguisher from the pile that Zap recieved when they were restocking everything. We're just going to have to wait for it to burn down." She slung the largish black purse back over her shoulder and crossed her arms in front of her chest in a way that suggested finality. Dean very rarely contradicted her, and in this particular case did not see the need to do so.