Danger Magellan's Invasion of Earth

Chapter 12

Chapter 12

I attempted to avoid Dan again the next day, but it was impossible when he was constantly nagging me. "Nora?" he asked. "Can you invite Arthur and Raquel over? I need to talk to both of them."

"I'm not doing any favors for you, Dan," I told him. "I know what you did to Cody."

"I had a good reason for it, and I'll tell you what it is if you just invite your friends over," Dan said. "I'd do it myself, but I don't have one of those phone things that you all own."

"I don't believe you, Dan," I said.

"Again, I'll explain everything," he said. "You just have to give me a chance."

"Fine, but I'll never forgive you for shooting Cody," I said. I picked up my cell phone and texted both Arthur and Raquel. Both of them replied that they could come over that evening.

I didn't know what sort of explanation could excuse shooting an innocent high school student, but apparently Dan had one. For a moment, I wondered if Dan was really gathering all of us up to kill us. It didn't make sense though. He seemed to genuinely care about Arthur, at least, so it seemed unlikely that he would try to kill him.

I spent the rest of the afternoon watching movies and worrying about that evening. Around 7:00, Arthur knocked on the front door, and I let him in. "Hey Arthur," I said.

"Hi Nora. Hi Dan," Arthur said.

"It's good to see you, Arthur," Dan said. He gave Arthur a peck on the lips and then took Blaze out of her cage. The hedgehog tried to crawl away from Dan almost immediately. "Come back, Blaze!" he shouted as his pet scurried across the floor. Dan followed Blaze as she ran under Mom's desk. When he found her, he reached underneath the desk and picked up his hedgehog. "There you are," Dan said. "I was worried that I had lost you again."

All of a sudden, Raquel knocked on the door. I opened the door and greeted Raquel, who had brought one of her latest robotic creations along. "I call it the Checkers Bot," Raquel explained. "It's just a prototype though. I tried to make it unbeatable at checkers, but it knocks over the pieces far too often for that to ever happen. I really need to work on optimizing it for fine motor control."

"Can I try it out?" I asked.

"Maybe later," Raquel said. "I want to know why we're all here. You said that Dan was going to tell us something important."

"He did say that," I said.

All of us looked towards Dan. "Fine," he said as the Russian-sounding tones dropped out of his voice. "I really should come clean. My name is not Dan, I'm not from Albania, and Blaze is not a hedgehog."

"I knew it!" Arthur exclaimed. "I told you all that he wasn't from Albania, and I was right!"

"I think we all knew that his name wasn't really Dan and that he wasn't from Albania, but how is Blaze not a hedgehog?" I said.

"None of this makes sense," Raquel said. "You're going to have to explain yourself, Dan. What is your real name?"

"Danger Magellan," he replied.

"That can't be your real name," I said.

"It's too ridiculous to be true," Raquel said.

Dan (or was it Danger?) took out a small booklet and tossed it towards the three of us. "This is my interplanetary passport," he said. "It has all of my information in it."

I opened up the passport and found a photo of Dan/Danger, complete with electric blue hair and a slightly crooked smile, along with several lines of text in a foreign script. "The English version of that is listed on page seven," Dan said.