Author's Note: This chapter is, for the most part, just Robbie and Stephanie. I got several reviews asking for more scenes with the two of them, and due to RL demands, I didn't have time to write a longer chapter with the other characters in it. The chapter that follows this will take place at the same time as this one, and follow the actions of Sportacus and the others.

"No shouting, got it?" He told Stephanie. She nodded. He removed his hand from her mouth and she turned to face Robbie Rotten.

"Robbie! What the hell are you doing here?" She demanded.

"Shh shh! Your aunt is lurking down the hallway, remember?"

"I know! What are you doing hiding in my room? Watching me undress, you pervert!"

"Oh please, Pinky. Don't flatter yourself," Robbie rolled his eyes and scoffed. "Sportacus and Marvleosa think I'm responsible for your kidnapping. I needed to avoid them. And...damn it all...I need your help."

"Me?"

"Yes, you! If you tell them that I had nothing to do with it, they'll believe you!"

Stephanie looked away and sighed. Robbie glared at her. "What? You don't actually think I did all this, do you?" When she didn't answer, he added softly, "Stephanie?"

She looked up at him. "Of course not. But just because I believe you doesn't mean that will be enough. We need proof. Solid proof."

Suddenly there was a knock on the door, startling them both. "Stephanie! Are you all right?"

Frowning, Stephanie went to the door and called out, "Yes, Aunt Bessie, I'm almost done!"

"Okay. We need to leave soon, dear."

"Be right there!" Stephanie called. She listened for the sounds of her aunt's footsteps retreating, then locked the door and turned back to Robbie. "There has to be a way to prove that you had nothing to do with this."

After thinking for a moment, Robbie replied, "There might be. The chemical that was used on you...I developed it in my underground lab years ago. After I patented it, I sealed up the lab and I haven't been back there since. So if we go there and we find that the lab has been broken into, that will prove that someone else was behind it."

"But what if you go to the lab and it wasn't broken into? I mean, couldn't someone have replicated your formula?"

"No. Highly unlikely. When you got sprayed with the chemical, you said it a sweet sort of smell and taste?"

"Yeah! It did."

"I laced my original sample of the chemical with a type of sugar alcohol. It added the taste and scent without altering the effectiveness. My own sort of calling card, if you will."

"And when you got the chemical patented by the government, you didn't document the sugar alcohol in the report you filed," Stephanie finished for him. "So only your original sample would have it."

"That's it. Very good, Pinky. You're not as dumb as you look."

Stephanie glared. "Gee, thanks, Robbie. I wish I could say the same to you." She took a deep breath. "Okay, we have a plan. You head to the lab, and I'll talk to Uncle Milford and Sportacus..."

"No! You need to come with me!"

"What?"

"You're my leverage, don't you see?" If you come with me and see the lab and the chemical missing for yourself, then I'll have a witness! We need to go-now!"

"But..." Stephanie thought back to the last few days, thinking of reconciling with Aunt Bessie and promising Uncle Milford that she wouldn't keep anything from him again. If they discovered she was missing again, what would that do to them?

She couldn't put them through that again. She said to Robbie, "Just come downstairs with me. Let me talk to them. They'll listen to me."

Robbie growled in irritation. "It's not going to work. What don't you understand? I developed the chemical. I convinced Sportacus not to search for you in that field, and..." he sighed in regret, "I know the Arm working on this."

"The 'Arm'?"

"The guy the Syndicate assigned to get this done. Clive. He's been sleazing around town for weeks. Look...you know I'd rather sew my lips shut than ever ask for a favor from anyone. But I'm asking you now! Just do this for me!"

Stephanie stared into his eyes, feeling more torn than she ever had in her life.

Meanwhile, in the hallway, Bessie was starting to get nervous. She didn't want to invade Stephanie's privacy, but it was taking much longer than it should for her to get ready to go.

"Bessie, dear!" Milford approached her. "We need to go."

"I know, Milford! But Stephanie's still in her room getting ready. I don't know what's taking so long."

Milford hesitated, then he crept close to the door and listened. There was no sound.

"Knock, Milford!"

Obeying her, he knocked gently. "Stephanie? Dearest, are you all right?"

While Milford was knocking, Stephanie had grabbed an old receipt and a pen from her desk and hastily scrawled a note. Then she watched Robbie climb out of her window, kneel into a squat on the ledge, and then, jump to the ground, incredibly landing on his feet. Even in the panic of the moment, Stephanie had to admire this. When he was motivated properly, Robbie could be almost as athletic as Sportacus.

"Come on! Jump!" Robbie called to her.

"I...my foot..."

"I'll catch you! Come on!"

Stephanie hesitated, then she heard Uncle Milford call, "Stephanie, we're coming in! Oh! It's locked!"

"Stephanie, unlock the door!" Bessie cried.

"I have the master key in our room. I'll get it!" Milford told her.

Stephanie looked back at Robbie. "Will you just come on?" He hissed.

She exhaled and closed her eyes. She sat on the window ledge, then pushed herself off and felt herself falling.

Oh God, would she hit the ground?

But then she felt arms coming to wrap around her, holding her off the ground before she could make impact. She clung to them. Stephanie opened her eyes and realized that Robbie kept his word.

She also realized that his face was less than two inches from hers.

"You, uh..." she murmured breathlessly, "You caught me."

"I said I would, didn't I?"

"Yeah...um...you should probably put me down so we can go."

He blinked. "Yeah." Like a robot, Robbie mechanically set her down and proceeded to walk off, trusting that Stephanie would follow.

And she did. Walking as fast as her injury would allow her, she caught up to him and asked, "How do we get to your lab?"

"There's an entrance in the ground near the school. It leads to a tunnel that dead ends at my lab." He turned around and glared at her. "Will you be able to keep up?"

She grinned. "If I can't, you could always carry me."

He grimaced and kept walking. "Five minutes in and I already regret asking you for help."

He didn't dare tell her he appreciated her levity.

Stephanie and Robbie were nearly to the school when Milford finally located the key and got the bedroom door open. He and Bessie just stood in the empty pink pastel room, staring dumbly at the open window.

There was a soft flapping noise, and Milford turned to see a white piece of paper, held down by a glass figurine of a ballerina, on his niece's desk. He lifted the paper and read: I'm sorry. I had to go. Wordlessly he handed the paper to Bessie to read.

Finally Bessie turned to her husband. "We have to tell Sportacus about this."

"Yes," Milford agreed.

"And then what do we do?"

Milford licked his lips, realizing his mouth had gone dry. After a few moments, he replied, "We do what we have to. We bring the town together. We help keep everyone safe. And we hope and pray that Stephanie is all right."

"So are you going to tell me what this is all about?" Stephanie asked as Robbie was pulling on the metal chains that held the passage door shut.

"What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean. You know more about this than anyone else. Care to clue me in?"

He scowled as he knelt down and began to climb down the stairs. "The less you know, the better." Robbie got to the fourth stair before he realized she wasn't following him. He turned to see her standing there. "What are you waiting for? Come on!"

"I'm not going any further until you tell me who these people are and what they want with us."

"Come on, kid..."

"No! I'm putting a lot of trust in you. I'm doing you a favor! I ran out on my family for you! Quid pro quo, Robbie! Spill it!"

He stared at her for a moment, then sighed and held out his hand to her. "Come down here, and I'll tell you. The stairs are old and narrow. You need to be careful."

She took his hand and clomped down the stairs. Once she was at the bottom, Robbie climbed back up and pulled the door shut. The passage was dark and dusty and smelled of moss and must. Stephanie gagged and rubbed her nose, as it was getting irritated from the dank air. Stephanie had let go of Robbie's hand so he could close the trap door. He didn't offer it again after that, so she resigned herself to pressing her hands to the filthy walls to navigate.

They'd walked for about five minutes when she said, "So?"

She couldn't see his face, but she could imagine his scowl in the dark. "They're called the Syndicate. It's a worldwide network of villains. Some you've heard of, some you haven't-and trust me, you don't want to."

"And you...belong to this group?"

"I used to. I left a couple of years ago."

"How long were you a, um, a member?"

"Once I left home and moved to Lazytown, so well over ten years."

"But...you never leave Lazytown, so, how could you commit crimes and stuff?"

"Oh Pinky. It must be nice living in your sunshine world. I didn't have to leave Lazytown to belong to the Syndicate. I engineered things-weapons, gear, tools-and sold them to whomever could meet my price. I was a supplier."

"But you never actually committed any crimes yourself."

"I suppose not." Robbie wasn't sure if he was proud of or disappointed by this fact.

"Then why is the Syndicate after you?"

Robbie paused for a moment, as they'd reached a division in the hallway. It had been a while; he had to recall which way was right. "The Syndicate can be vindictive. If you're not with them, you're against them. And there's a price for leaving that world. I didn't make it any better for myself since I started selling my services to legitimate corporations like Wayne Industries." After debating for a moment, Robbie turned down the left hallway passage.

"So why me?" Stephanie asked as she followed him.

"Huh?"

"If the Syndicate is after you, why did they kidnap me? Why would they link me to you?"

Robbie stopped in his tracks, his back to her. Clive and his team were probably following him for weeks, now that he thought about it. They must have seen him talking to the girl from time to time. They knew he hated everyone...but the fact that there was someone he could tolerate speaking to meant there was at least one person he didn't hate. And that made her a perfect target.

He was a damn fool. He knew he should have stayed away from her, and he didn't.

"Robbie?"

"What, kid?"

"Why did they go after me? What's so special about me?"

He turned around to face her; it was so dark, the only thing he could really see was the outline of her hair and the light reflected from her pupils. He had to think up something fast. "I think...they want to incriminate me so I'll have no choice but to go back to them. If you were kidnapped and you...you...didn't make it, then that would be devastating. To uh...everyone else. And they'd want to skin me alive."

"But...I haven't lived in this town for six years. Aren't there others that would have been better targets? I mean, not that I want anyone else to be targeted…"

"Your uncle is mayor..."

"Former mayor."

"Look, I don't know, okay, kid?" Robbie snapped. "For some reason, they're going after you. And the Arm they put in charge doesn't accept failure. He won't stop until he gets this done. Remember, dear girl, that everyone you love is up above our heads right now, just sitting ducks for professional killers. So how about we stop speculating in this filthy hole, and get to my lab and get the evidence we need to clear my name?"

"All right." The words came quietly in the dark.

Robbie sighed in annoyance and resumed his walk to the lab, pretending he wasn't listening for the sounds of her footsteps. About ten minutes later, and they were there. After contending with the mass of locks he'd installed to keep his lab safe, Robbie got the reinforced steel doors to slide open for them. As they entered, lights installed in the ceiling activated automatically, flooding everything with bluish white, 100-watt illumination.

Stephanie looked around. The lab was not massive by any stretch (the labs at her University certainly dwarfed this one), but the sheer amount of draped prototypes and inventions that sat upon the tables gave it great potential. Everything was a bit dusty, but it looked like it had been maintained very well in its time. Robbie must have spent a good deal of time here.

Robbie watched her. "Over here, to the right." He gestured to a far corner.

Stephanie followed him over, wincing slightly. Her foot was beginning to hurt. They'd done quite a bit of walking—probably more than Doctor Bonebreak would have wanted her to do. Trying to ignore it, she watched as Robbie donned gloves and opened a cabinet filled with chemical samples. He knelt down, eyes scanning the names of the glass tubes, each starting with "ROT" and then a numerical code.

"Do you know which one it is?" Stephanie asked.

"Of course. Never forget any of them. Gonna take a while, though. I have quite a few."

She winced again and braced her hands on the edge of the table. "I don't think this is a good sign."

"Why?" He looked up at her.

"Well, the doors were still secure, weren't they? Doesn't look like anything has been tampered with or knocked over or damaged. Everything looks to be in order."

"That's no indication. The Syndicate is brutal, but they're meticulous too. They can cover their tracks if they want." Robbie then noticed her wincing and asked, "What's wrong?"

"My ankle. Been on it for too long."

"For God's sake, why didn't you say anything? Here-sit down, sit down." The villain grabbed a chair from one of the other tables and pulled it in front of her. The moment she sat down, he knelt in front of her and pulled her boot off.

"What are you doing?"

"I've got something around here I can put on it."

Stephanie looked around skeptically, recalling that in this laboratory, the drug that was used on her was made. "Um...is it safe?"

"You wanna stay in pain, Pinky? Be my guest."

"No, I'll take it."

Robbie rifled through his cabinets until he found a hermetically sealed jar filled with a bluish green, waxy substance. Once again kneeling before her, he started to rub the ointment on her ankle.

Stephanie crinkled her nose. "Wow, that's strong. What is that-eye of newt?"

That actually elicited a grin from Robbie. "Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme, actually. No, really. It is. Along with a couple of other things not yet approved by the FDA."

"I won't ask."

"I appreciate that. Any better?"

Stephanie wiggled her toes. It really did feel better, like before her foot had been fractured. "Yes. Thanks."

"Good. Now sit there and be quiet while I keep looking."

"Robbie?" Stephanie asked after a while.

"What?"

"You were the one who first found me, not Sportacus."

"Yeah. So?"

"Well...on the news and in the police reports, Sportacus is the one who got the credit for rescuing me."

"What's your point?"

"Why didn't you correct them? You deserved the credit too."

"What makes you think I wanted the credit?"

Stephanie winced—and this time it wasn't due to her ankle. "I told you before that you were capable of great things…I guess I thought that—you know…"

Robbie just stared at her. Then he replied, in a soft, coarse voice, "Nobody wants to read about a villain being the hero. People want things to go according to "the plan." And "the plan" was always that Sportacus is the hero. Oh hell, Pinky – what does it matter anyway?"

"Why didn't you come to visit me in the hospital?" She asked.

"Why would I?"

"Well, you were worried enough to search for me. I just thought you'd...you know...want to make sure I'm okay?"

"You have enough people that dote on you and fawn all over you. What do you want-more? Can't you leave well enough alone?"

She swallowed hard and replied, "That wasn't the way I was thinking about it."

He actually stopped what he was doing and walked up to her, getting close to her face. "You need to stop thinking that just because I felt sorry for you, it means that I'm a good person. The inventions I've sold have been used for terrible things. You need to understand that about me. Seems like everyone else gets that but you." He sighed and walked away again. "Honestly, kid...because of who I am, I didn't think my presence would be needed or wanted."

She looked down. "I thought I was going to die. I could have. Your presence would have meant the world."

Robbie didn't answer for a long while as he kept searching for the chemical. He looked over at her a few minutes later. She was sitting there, head on her hands. After debating with himself for a few seconds, he finally said, "I did come to visit you once. When you were at the hospital. But you didn't know I was there."

She looked up, hope starting to glimmer on her face. "I guess I was asleep."

He turned away, worried that she'd figure it out. "Yeah, I guess you were." At last, he came to his last file of samples. Yes, this was the one: ROT-342. His first and only narcotic and paralytic agent.

"Is that it?"

Robbie jumped, being startled by Stephanie's presence over his shoulder. Scowling at her, he hissed, "Yes, this is it. At least, this is where it should be."

She frowned. "The samples were taken, and the packaging was left."

Robbie nodded. "No doubt in my mind-someone stole my formula and covered their tracks very well. If you hadn't been attacked, I might have never realized it was taken. I haven't been down here in years."

She watched as he carefully packed up the empty case. "So why did you develop the formula? Or any of them for that matter?"

"We should go," Robbie told her, ignoring her question. "Get the sheriff's office to dust for fingerprints. Hopefully between the tampered vial and your witness testimony, that will be enough to clear me of any wrongdoing."

She clasped his shoulder as he was turning away. "Please. You ignored me last time. Tell me."

He sighed and replied, "I wanted to try my hand at chemistry a couple of years ago. It was one of the last scientific fields I hadn't delved into at that point. So I built this lab and started experimenting. I had...dozens of failures. But the chemical that was used on you was one of my few successes."

"Why did you create that one in particular?"

He glowered at her. "There was a Russian crime boss by the name of Kavanov who requested it. He had an important meeting with several other mob leaders and he wanted to wipe them out with little to no resistance. It knocked them out so Kavanov's men could take them all out. The chemical is designed to work quickly and in a wide area." He looked her up and down for a moment. "It's highly concentrated, meant to be dispersed in an open location. But you had it sprayed directly in your face. Frankly, I'm amazed that you're still here. A hit like that should have killed you instantly."

Stephanie thought for a moment. Then she replied, "I've never been drunk."

Robbie rolled his eyes. "Why am I not surprised, Miss Goody Two-Shoes?"

"No, that's not what I mean. I've drank. I've drank as much as any college student might, and even before college. The day I graduated from high school, my mom kissed me and wished me well that morning, then told me she wouldn't be there because there she had an interview with a magazine or something." A bitter smile crossed her face. "Every other kid had someone there to cheer for them, except me. I got home and got one of her bottles of scotch and drank the whole thing in 30 minutes. And nothing. Not even tipsy. I might as well have drunk water. My mom is the same way. She's the only other person I know who's like this."

Robbie nodded. "It sounds like your liver and kidneys are hyper efficient at filtering toxins. Your mom...she has pink hair like you?"

"Yes."

"So this filtration factor might be linked to the gene that's responsible for your hair color."

"Yeah. Maybe."

"Make sure that the government never gets ahold of you, Pinky. They'll dissect you like lab rat."

"Wow. Kind."

"What can I say? I'm full of sage advice."

"Hmm...you're full of something. Like you said, let's go."

They were heading to the door when they heard the doors start to slide apart. "Someone's here," Stephanie whispered.

"We need to hide," Robbie said. "Over here. Come on!"

They had just lunged behind a large cabinet when the intruder appeared. Stephanie peered around the corner to see who it was, then smiled. Nothing to worry about.

Robbie gasped when she began to emerge from their hiding spot. "What the hell are you doing?" He hissed fiercely, trying to pull on her arm.

"It's okay!" She walked out and waved at the newcomer. "Officer Welles!"

The police officer turned and stared at her grimly. "Hello, Stephanie," he greeted her.

His handgun sat neatly in his hand at his side, loaded and ready to be fired.