It's Not What You Think

Chapter 7

For a fic I started while very sleep deprived, it just made sense to post a chapter after losing an hour to daylight savings time. Anyway, the plot is still really not meant to be coherent here. I just kind of type whatever comes to mind, and if I'm lucky it might make sense. Hopefully it at least kind of does.

Chip was so incredibly bored. He was stuck on a field trip with Jawa and all of the kids from his new school, and instead of getting a nice, knowledgeable guide, their teacher was attempting to show them around the battlefield in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania by himself. It was not going well.

Not a single person in the class seemed interested in what was going on, not even the teacher. He was mostly just trying to get the kids to all shut up and pay attention to what he was trying to say, but even he was aware that he wasn't saying much worth hearing.

Suddenly, though, the sound of a plane going way too fast filled the air as a strangely futuristic ship went zooming overhead.

No one else seemed to notice though, figuring it was just a plain old airplane, all distracted by the fact that one of the students had just broken a fence and the teacher was now yelling at him.

"How hard was it to just go on a nice normal field trip without you causing trouble?! I'm sure that that fence is federal property and that..."

"Do you think that thing in the sky was them?" Chip whispered to Jawa.

"That's the only logical explanation I can think of," Jawa said.

"Hey!" Mike whisper shouted to Chip and Jawa from behind a tree.

Chip and Jawa quietly slipped away from their class, the students still keeping their full attention on the teacher chewing out the kid who broke the fence.

"So, how did all this happen?" Jawa asked.

"Well," Catherine said, "I'm not actually from here. I'm from Pluto."

"Oh," Chip said. "Since when?"

"Since always," Catherine said. "And Erica knew, and Trixie is a Plutonian as well, but I was forced to keep it a secret from everyone else."

"So is Erica adopted?" Jawa asked.

"No," Erica said.

"She is a human because of Alexander," Catherine explained.

"I don't think I really understand how that works," Jawa said.

"Yes, well just think of it as a trait like eye color because we have more important things to discuss. First of all, what would you all like to do here?"

"Is there anything good to do here?" Chip asked.

"Of course there is," Trixie said. "This is such a cool place."

"But you're a battlefield nerd," Chip said. "Wasn't Cyrus just taking you to them when the Croatoan meant you had to leave that one boarding school you were at in Connecticut?"

"Yes," Trixie said. "But it's still fun for other people too."

"Why don't we go up in the metal lookout tower?" Catherine suggested. "We'll be able to get such a lovely view of things up there. And, given the current behavior of that class, I doubt they'll be allowed up there."

"Let's hope so," Jawa muttered, glancing back to his class.

After Jawa and Chip had left spy school and been sent to Pennsylvania in the witness protection program, they had both discovered just how much of a bubble they had been living in at spy school. Because while some of their classmates (including Chip) had come off as huge idiots at spy school, they were still way above the average teenager in so many ways. Chip's worst day still felt to him to be about a million times better than some of these kids best days. (Though Jawa didn't have nearly that much confidence in Chip's skills. But even he agreed that Chip was more talented than all of these people.) The CIA didn't have a whole lot of patience for immature high schoolers. Most other schools had no choice.