MY BEST FRIEND IS A SECRET AGENT, Book 2: How C.H.I.P. Took a Dive to Dash...

Chapter 18: "Dr. Eelstrom's Evil Plan"

Dr. Eelstrom had this creepy little octopus perched on his shoulder like a parrot, and he was talking to it.

I guess that's what you do when all your friends are fish. But Dr. Eelstrom was fishy in other ways too. His skin looked slimy and scaly, and his eyes bugged out behind his thick glasses.

In a way, I couldn't blame him for the path he'd chosen in life. I wondered what it must've been like for him in school. I'm guessing nobody wanted to talk to the slimy kid with fish-like bug eyes. I mean, like most wacky bad guys, Dr. Eelstrom probably didn't start out evil. He just got rejected by the normal world and chose to envision one that was more accepting of him—a world under the sea.

Too bad he didn't just keep that world to himself and his fishy friends. Why'd he have to try to force everybody else to live in it too?

It was then that I realized it was Dr. Eelstrom who sat in front of Chip and me when we went to see Thundersplash!

I kicked myself—if we had nabbed him then, we wouldn't be in this pickle today! (And we would've been able to watch the movie without his stupid head in the way too!) But the fact was, I had been too distracted by Carla Mawhinney to have been on the lookout for wacky bad guys at the time. Curse the way her hair shined under the theater lights!

Forcing myself to refocus on the job at hand, I had Stella fly the Ladybug Drone around Eelstrom's lair.

One entire wall was this huge aquarium full of hundreds of electric eels.

Now I knew how he was powering his hideout! All those eels could probably keep the place going for years. But the main thing I wanted to find out was how Dr. Eelstrom was getting seawater into Lake Vortville—and why? Fortunately, C.H.I.P. and I had arrived just in time to hear the wacky doctor brag about his evil plan to his only audience, his pet octopus.

"My Eelstrom Eelectric Suctionator is working!" Dr. Eelstrom cried, throwing his arms up with glee. He rushed over to what looked like a complete model of Vortville, with all the buildings and houses and everything, all the way to the ocean! It was actually kind of cool . . . but I knew from the movies that whenever a bad guy has a model of some city or something, it's usually just to illustrate something evil he's going to do with it.

And, yeah, that's what happened here.

Dr. Eelstrom lifted away half of the Vortville model, so now it was like a cut-out, even showing the earth under the city. And running from the ocean, all the way under Vortville and to the bottom of the lake was this massive underground pipe!

"You see?" Eelstrom explained, gesturing to the model, "I'm drawing water from the ocean and filling up Lake Vortville right to the brim!" Then he flipped a switch, and the miniature version of his Eelstrom Eelectric Suctionator sucked the water from the ocean part of his model right up to the Lake Vortville part. "The dam will overflow and then collapse under the pressure," the evil doctor said to his octopus. "Then it'll be good-bye, Vortville and hello underwater Vortville where I, Dr. Lars Eelstrom, will bring the city into a new age of life under the sea!"

Eelstrom flipped another switch—but nothing happened this time. Annoyed, he flipped it again. And again. "Break, you stupid dam!" he hissed. Meanwhile, the water just dribbled over the top of the model dam and trickled slowly down to the model city below.

Not very impressive.

The doctor turned a bit red and said to the octopus, "The real thing will be a lot more dramatic, I promise."

So that was Dr. Eelstrom's evil plan! To flood Vortville and turn it into his idea of an undersea utopia! Too bad if everybody else would see it as a waterlogged disaster.

But one thing kept bugging me: How could Eelstrom have built all this stuff without being discovered? How could he have constructed a supercomplicated control center right at the bottom of Lake Vortville and then drilled a tunnel under the city out to the ocean? He had to have had some help, someone who maybe covered things up while he was doing all that work.

And then it hit me: Dr. Eelstrom's work had been covered up by the greatest cover-upper of all time—Pinkie! Could it be that her Covered Lake exhibit was intended to cover more than just Lake Vortville?

I called Stella and had her do some research on Pinkie right away. And in just a few clicks, she found the answer: Dr. Eelstrom and Pinkie were brother and sister!

Not only that, they were TWINS!

While little Lars Eelstrom was creeping the other kids out at school with all his fishy sliminess, his twin sister, Pinkeborg, was weirding them out with her goofy artwork!

And now, as an adult, Pinkie covered up her twin brother's crimes—literally! And I'll bet she was the one who helped Dr. Eelstrom escape from prison too!

Just then, calamity struck: Dr. Eelstrom spotted the Ladybug Drone! He picked it up, no doubt wondering how a bug got into his hideout. I was terrified of what he might do. Would he crush it? Would he feed it to his pet octopus?!

Nope, he just let it fly away!

What did I tell you about ladybugs? Everybody loves them, even wacky bad guys!

This was perfect. Now we could spy on Dr. Eelstrom night and day!