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

Chapter 32: "Saving Water, Energy and Vortville"

Interestingly, it turned out that my dad had seen a lot of how C.H.I.P. took down Dr. Eelstrom and saved Vortville Dam.

After he'd escaped Eelstrom's underwater prison, he and his men had watched in amazement as C.H.I.P. did his thing.

So, for a moment, I actually thought Dad would let C.H.I.P. continue to be Vortville's hero guy without trying to shut him down.

But, in the end, Dad remained Dad. "Sure, 'the hero guy', as the papers call him, is impressive," Dad gruffly explained. "But what this city needs is a team of professionals to keep it safe from wacky bad guys! If 'the hero guy' hadn't intruded, my men and I would have easily escaped Dr. Eelstrom's jail cell and brought the crook to justice in no time!"

So that was that. Chip and I would stay in the shadows, Dad would keep being Dad . . . and Carla Mawhinney would remain the unattainable wish she'd always been. But at least I could silently revel in the fact that she still had a big crush on C.H.I.P., the hero guy that I had, in fact, created!

Speaking of Chip (the goofy guy, not the hero guy), he went on with his life as if nothing weird had happened at all. He was getting used to saving Vortville as C.H.I.P., so foiling Dr. Eelstrom's evil plan to flood the city was just another day for him. In fact, he just wanted to do more waterskiing, which was the funnest part of the latest hero guy experience for him.

And he wasn't the only one laughing it up at Lake Vortville. Now that the lake was back to normal, everybody wanted to go and play on the beach and splash in the fresh water again.

Even Mayor Mooney was out on the lake. "Come out and have a blast at Lake Vortville, everybody!" he announced to Anastasia O'Neil's TV camera. "Sure, we've got to conserve water again, I guess," he added, kind of faking being all concerned, "but that doesn't mean we can't have fun doing it!" Then he took off waterskiing across the lake, just like before. "WA-HOO!"

My mom wasn't very happy with Mayor Mooney's cavalier attitude towards water conservation, but she was thrilled that the whole near-apocalypse with Dr. Eelstrom had provided lots of new educational experiences for everybody. For one thing, C.H.I.P.'s taking down of Dr. Eelstrom proved Mom's favorite law of physics, "Every action has an equal and opposite reaction," many times over.

But the greatest thing that came from Eelstrom's attack, my mom thought, was that the city was able to use the hundreds of captured electric eels as a carbon-free source of power! "Green energy, Nort," Mom said. "It's the power of the future!"

I told her I couldn't agree more. I was all about reducing my carbon footprint as an inventor. In fact, I'd designed the C.H.I.P. microthingy 2.0 to use 23 percent less energy than the first one!

And, speaking of the first microthingy, I was still unable to find it after Chip and I had lost it at school. But I figured, what's the harm? I mean, even if someone found it, they'd just think it was a piece of dead electronic junk or something.

Unless that someone was Gert von Brugen.

And indeed, I found out later that, while Chip and I were silently enjoying yet another success putting a wacky bad guy out of business, Gert was the someone who found the C.H.I.P. microthingy 1.0!

It also turned out that the microchip wasn't totally dead after all. In fact, after Gert accidentally stepped on it in the cafeteria, it sparked red a few times, which is what caught her eye.

She picked it up, not knowing what it was. But then she remembered the red spark that she'd seen in C.H.I.P. the master baker's mouth before she ripped out his false tooth.

Might this broken microchip have something to do with the hero guy?

Might it also have something to do with me, Nort McKrakken??

Gert didn't know. But she did know the microchip had something to do with something . . . and she wasn't going to rest until she found out what!

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(Have you read book 1 in the series? Check it out by clicking on my name. And you can buy it in hardcover worldwide! This book, book 2, will be published in hardcover worldwide in April, 2023!)