There hasn't been an update in a while, and I'll tell you why. I've been away on vacation since the beginning of July, and just finally managed to get back home and back to the computer. There isn't any solid action yet, but in the next chapter, all will be explained as to how the robot got in the hands of Mojo, and what Dexter intends to do to help her. Action to come soon, so just please be patient.

Heightened Tensions- Chapter 24

At first, everything was dark, the downward spiral of stairs leading to nothing but empty blackness. Bubbles had no idea what she was looking at, but for some reason knew it definitely wasn't a wine cellar.

Dexter had pulled the book from his shelf, hid hands gripping tightly to the frayed leather edges of the cover, pulling out and down as a metallic thwack of gears echoed into the still night air. Bubbles initially thought that he was just showing her something inside that book, but she soon realized that was not the case, right about the time the bookcase started sliding on the wall.

Bubbles jumped backwards, while Dexter stayed perfectly calm, her own thoughts running through all of the most horrible possibilities, all of them including monsters coming out from that gaping hole in his wall… a gaping hole… no, it was a doorway… I giant freaking passage hidden behind his bookshelf. Wherever it led, she had no idea.

The bookshelf grinded to a halt just near the desk, the lingering clanks or moving machinery settling against the quiet darkness. For a beat, they were both paused, and Bubbles half expected to see a light shine on from underneath Dexter's door. But one never came. How did they not hear that?!

Dexter moved first, and Bubbles could tell he was watching her, trying to read a reaction from her face, which was molded into nothing but still disbelief. What was she supposed to be seeing? What exactly was down there that had to be hidden by a bookshelf filled with some sort of machinery? And what in the hell did he expect her to say?

"Well, are you coming?" Dexter said finally, turning to face Bubbles, who was still quite frozen on the carpet. She half expected her voice not to work at all. First, she was chased by X through a neighborhood, crashed into a pool, nearly drowned, woke up in some strangers house who she thought was going to kill her, and then the stranger turned out to be Dexter. What. Were. The. Odds. And not to mention, suddenly she was facing a secret cavern in the middle of his bedroom.

"Um…. Err… coming where?" Bubbles asked tentatively, her voice a thin squeak that was reminiscent of her younger years.. She shifted her eyes onto his face, but he looked relatively amused at her reaction.

"To my lab of course. You're the only person I've decided to actually show-"

"You're WHAT?!" she squealed, louder than she should have, and Dexter nearly had a fit. He drove his pointer finger so hard into his pursed lips that she thought he was purposely trying to hurt himself. They both listened, and soon the only sound that came in response, was the deep, guttering grunt of someone in another room. The sound electrified Bubbles into a near fit of terror, jerking her just one step shy of where Dexter was standing. He only relaxed.

"My dad snores…" he said casually, before eyeing her strangely as she wore the most dumbfounded expression imaginable.

"I'm not going down there…"

"Look, it'll be safer down there, anyway. If…. Er- X, or, whatever, is still wandering around out there somewhere, he won't be able to find you if you just go down there with me…"

"You want me to walk down into a deep, dark, isolated crevice with you… that nobody else knows about-"

"Oh, for God's sake, what the hell do you think I'm going to do?" he said, his voice very exasperated as he rolled his eyes, but there was a touch of disbelieved humor in his tone. Bubbles only stared at him, her expression very doe-eyed, altogether mistrusting, but Dexter was only losing his patience with her.

"Look, are you going to trust me or not? You act like you just met me yesterday-"

"Maybe I just met you today…"

He blinked at her a few times, before closing his eyes. That's when Bubbles noticed he wasn't wearing his glasses.

Why would I notice something so irrelevant?

"Look, let me explain this to you later, because we're kind of on a time limit," Dexter said, his voice quiet but hurried. Bubbles forgot her feelings of mistrust, but blushed a little at the implications of what she nearly feared. She knew he wasn't like that. He was too stupid for that.

"What do you mean a time limit?" she questioned, glancing outside the window, as the subject of limit suddenly put her on edge.

"The electric jolt I gave that robot will only conk out its navigation and radar systems for about ten more minutes… we need to make sure we're down here when that happens-"

"AHA! You did have a gun!"

Dexter stopped short and stared at her lamely. Her finger was poking very persistently at his chest.

"You're kidding, right?"

"Then you lied to me!" Bubbles said fiercely, grinding her finger even harder into his breastbone, but hardly getting more than a flinch.

"Look, can we discuss this later, because- OHH, you knew I was lying anyway," he responded even fiercer, his voice just under a hiss. "Do you want my help or not, or would you rather get killed?!"

Bubbles stopped poking very abruptly, and once again gave him a very watery stare. His own expression softened, but there was still a twitch of urgency on his brow.

"I do want your help."

"Then would it help if I turned on the light?" he said quickly, before spinning around to the open doorway in the wall. He paused just short of the sheet of blackness, and Bubbles could just barely make out his silhouette as the extending darkness tugged at the remnants of his visibility. He was punching his fingers onto something resting on the wall, and Bubbles could barely make out the quick blips of sound as something reacted to his touch.

Bubbles drew back as the darkness suddenly erupted into light, a trail of shining orbs leading all the way down, even deeper than she'd imagined before. So deep, it almost seemed as if the stairways led… below ground.

"Well… come on then…"

"And where exactly am I going?" Bubbles said quietly, her eyes moving to Dexter who was looking at her very sincerely, his eyes patient as he watched her.

"It's a laboratory. Down there you can't be found. The robot's radars will never be able to penetrate the walls of the lab. I made sure of that a long time ago."

Bubbles took one last heavy breath and walked to Dexter, who turned and started downwards towards what must have been the end. Bubbles walked carefully down the stairs, not wanting to fall and bring him down with her. The steps were intensely steep, and she was close to feeling like she was going completely vertical. The walls around the stairs were all metal, many, many sheets of it put together by black bolts, interspaced with buzzing lights that led the way down. Some of the lights were flickering, popping as they died away into darkness, creating an eerie sense of foreboding and mystery in the atmosphere. She'd always known that he was hiding something, and this little incident just solidified that thought.

Of course, she hadn't intended for her secret to be quite this large.

But something about this whole thing bugged her to no end. This whole encounter was just too strange. She'd been to his house so many times before… and had even been in his room once or twice. Never had she found anything out of the ordinary, and never had she suspected something like this. How could this have been kept a secret for so long? Bubbles assumed he kept this hidden… but that would have to mean that he was quite a bit more intelligent than she'd previously thought.

But what kind of intelligence was it? All of this machinery and intrigue… seemed much to reminiscent of some sort of mad scientist bent on world domination… kind of like Mojo. Did she really know Dexter as well as she thought she did? She certainly saw him in a completely different light now, almost as if he was a completely different boy. Was he a friend… or was he an enemy? Was he really just leading her down to her doom, in league with Mojo himself? Worst of all, did he intend to hurt her? Certainly leading her down into a deep dark area where nobody would suspect a thing, and the fact that nobody knew where she was, made for the perfect opportunity to do something dastardly. But there was something else, maybe in his mannerisms, and the way he spoke to her, that just seemed too much of the polar opposite of Mojo. And after all… he had saved her in the pool, and not to mention the way he always looked at her, and watched her. Certainly not from someone who wanted to do her in.

Bubbles kept watching him as they moved downwards, when she wasn't watching her step of course. Maybe it was an aura… or just some sixth sense, or maybe her acute perception of danger, but something was telling her she could trust him, and she was all right with that.

"What exactly do you mean, you made sure of it a long time ago? Made sure of what?" Bubbles asked quietly, her voice jumping as she nearly fell. She reached out with her hand and caught his shoulder, and he turned just slightly to steady her, his hand catching her waist. They both blushed, but neither dwelled on it for too long, and soon Dexter began speaking.

"The robot uses a radar to find you, your own genetic pattern burned into its processor so that it can easily recognize you or find you. The radar finds your genetic pattern, and only yours, designed to attach to only one person, and whether or not that attachment results in death is up to the user-"

Dexter stopped, and Bubbles stumbled into his back, surprised at the sudden leveling of ground. She peeked around him, breathing in disbelief as they both faced yet another large door, this one made of solid steel that glinted in the harsh light, its edges dappled in a pattern of yellow and black lines. Dexter turned to another key-pad mechanism to their right, and pressed his hand against what had looked like a small video screen. There was a strange hum as a small string of light passed over his palm, and then a faint, female voice spoke from within the machine itself.

Welcome back to your lab, Dexter…

In another time, Bubbles would have found this all very amusing, but there was just something about this that wasn't making her laugh. For just a split second Bubbles swore she was dreaming, that there was no way this could be real… there was no way that her friend had this enormous secret just locked away below his house…

But when Bubbles felt his touch on her hand, she knew this had to be real, with the light feel of his touch against her skin. The door had opened, and it must have been quiet and fast, for Bubbles hadn't even noticed or heard a sound. She just stared ahead of her, hardly able to comprehend the magnitude and the size of the room before her. When he'd said it was a lab, she'd just thought he meant a small little closet underground. But this- this was an entire town.

Dexter was pulling her through, speaking to her, but a word was hardly getting in. The space was enormous, so big that Bubbles couldn't even see the other three walls. The ceiling, what must have been… five, maybe six stories above her, was covered completely with the same sheets of metal she'd seen going down, but the lights were hanging discs, with smaller orb lights covering the spaces between them. The floors, looked like nothing more than plain ceramic tiles, but upon closer inspection, she found them to be covered in what must have been a thin layer of Plexiglas.

At least those were parts of the floor she could see. Just about every inch of space was occupied by some sort of machine, all of them working and humming, colored lights flashing at perfectly spaced intervals of rest. They were lined in rows, packed together like the blocks of a city street, with tiled roads that ran between them.

To her left she saw what looked like a garden, a closed case filled to the brim with lush green plants bursting with the colors of their blooms, some of them too big and beautiful to even seem natural. To the right she saw shelves and shelves of vials and glowing fluids, perched just above counters and counters of space, littered with instruments and smaller machines. Just far off in the distance she saw a large cylinder stretching up towards the ceiling, widening out as it got closer to the top; a telescope. Standing firm just in front of what looked like a giant glass window… more rooms beyond? How was this real? How in the world did nobody know this was here? And where did he got the electricity to power such a monstrosity?

"The professor-er, my dad, would love it here…" Bubbles said quietly, and she knew Dexter heard, because he turned to her and gave her a lopsided, rather shy smile.

"In 45 seconds both of the doors are going to close, inside, the robot's radar movements will never be able to catch wind of you. I made sure these walls were impenetrable to the snooping eye, so the scanners, mounted inside the optical units, are never going to-"

Something snapped, and Bubbles very quickly let go of his hand.

"Wait a minute. How do you know so much about this robot?"

It was true. His explanations seemed to be a bit too wordy coming from a casual bystander. All her former suspicions popped up once again into her brain, running circles around her feelings of security with him. He spoke as if it was nothing more than a simple current event from the news.

Dexter didn't answer her, but paused for a beat, his back to her, before walking quickly away from her without a second glance. He moved foreword and to the left, to a square of randomly placed desks and counters of machinery, complementing a large video screen that must have been as big as the entire side of her house. He rummaged about for a while, until finally the screen sparked to life, a jagged, jittering yellow line moving across the screen like the readings of electrical impulses.

"Is it a little early for you to be awake?"

"Nah, it's winter break anyway, who needs sleep when there's lots of work to be done?"

He was talking to the computer. This was ridiculous. And to make matters worse it was talking back. All in all, Bubbles was losing her patience, mostly because Dexter had yet to answer her question.

"Dexter, how do you know so much about this robot?!"

He still didn't respond, but was now facing her, his head still down, going through a drawer at the side of on of the tables. Bubbles moved forward, noting his very strained expression and methods of avoidance as he continued to rummage, taking out large scraps of paper and thick notebooks which he set down loudly onto the table. She moved past a large shelf, larger than the others, and moved right up to him, angry.

"Dexter."

He paused, his head down, but his eyes inched up to meet her own.

"How is it you know so much about…X… you talk as if you-"

"As if I made it?

"Yeah, I guess-"

"Because I did."

Bubbles froze.

Silence.

Bubbles didn't know what made her turn around, maybe it was Dexter's shift in expression, his eyes moving behind her, but as soon as her eyes faced the other direction, she stopped dead. She was staring into the eyes of X, and it was staring back.