There's something Dr. Forrester's assistant
isn't telling him . . . but how does it concern the Shogun Scouts?
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Avon Camelot • 2000
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I admit it -- I've never lost my fascination with cartoons and
adventure serials, no matter how formulaic. This story,
written when both the Power Rangers and Sailor Moon
franchises were highly popular, gave me a chance to flip the formula
sideways.
Read an Excerpt....
I took another look at the “reality
separation generator.”
It looked like a cross between a fish tank, a video
arcade game, and a model of a space telescope.
Which made sense, considering that we’d assembled it
from a fish tank, nine different computers, three VCRs, a laserdisc
player, a box of aluminum foil, and an electric radio-controlled
model hovercraft. Dr. Will Forrester might be one of the most brilliant
scientists in St. Woodlawn, but he didn’t have much money for parts.
“Save the universe?” I said.
“I thought that’s what the Shogun Scouts were for.”
Dr. Forrester shook his head.
“That’s just it,” he said.
“The Shogun Scouts are the only reason this universe
exists in the first place.
We were created—invented out of whole cloth—by
people in another universe, the same way writers in Hollywood create
Saturday morning cartoons.
In a sense, we are a Saturday morning
cartoon, or at least we’re living on the inside of one.”
“We?” I echoed, looking at him.
The Shogun Scouts were teenagers, or so the
newspapers said. Dr. Forrester was young for a Ph.D. in theoretical
physics—maybe twenty-five—but too old for him to be one of the five
super-warriors who guarded St. Woodlawn from the Black Tong.
“I’m sorry, Petra,” he said.
“It was too dangerous to tell you before.
I was one of the original Shogun Scouts—Emerald, to
be precise. Jen-Dee recruited me when I was fourteen, maybe two years
older than you are now.”
I sucked in a startled breath.
Jen-Dee was said to be a nearly immortal being who
had created the Shogun Jewels dozens of centuries ago, and advised
the Shogun Scouts in their ongoing battle with the Black Tong and
its leader, who was known only as Master Obsidian.
At least that was the popular opinion.
Most of what people knew about the Scouts came from
cheap tabloid newspapers and cheesy investigative TV shows.
There’d been a couple of books written about them,
but it was hard for readers to tell what was true and what the
authors had made up for lack of reliable data.