9 Jill to the Rescue

CHAPTER 9 JILL TO THE RESCUE 'Oh my goodness,' says Jill. 'I love how you've decorated the tree this year—a twinkling light on every leaf, plastic reindeer hanging from the branches and a huge pile of inflatable Santas! The treehouse looks amazing!' 'Thanks,' I say. 'But they're not decorations— they're real reindeer, and real Santas!'

'Real?' says Jill. 'What do you mean?' 'Well,' I say, 'those reindeer are actually Santa's reindeer, and one of the Santas is the actual Santa. The others are clones. Santa crashed his sleigh and fell into the cloning machine.' 'And then all the Santas had a big belly bounce-off to see which one of them was the real Santa,' says Terry. 'But they ended up just knocking each other out.' 'But it's Christmas Eve!' says Jill. 'Santa should be out delivering presents.' 'We know,' says Terry.

'The children of the world are going to be so sad if they wake up and find their Christmas stockings empty,' says Jill. 'We know that, too!' I say. 'But what can we do? We can't deliver the presents.' 'Why not?' says Jill. 'Because we're not Santa,' I say. 'Where's his sleigh?' says Jill. 'Up there,' says Terry, pointing to where it is teetering dangerously on the edge of the level it crashed on.

'Great!' says Jill. 'And I can see Santa's sack of presents is still in the back. We can deliver them for him.' 'But how will we get all the reindeer out of the tree?' I say. 'Their antlers are all tangled up in the branches.' 'We can grab them with the GRABINATOR,' says Terry. 'It can grab anything from anywhere at any time.' 'But it would have to grab them very carefully,' I say, 'and that will take too long.'

'I agree,' says Jill. 'I think we should use my flying cats instead and get the reindeer down later, after we've delivered all the presents.' 'Well, what are we waiting for?' I say. 'Let's go!' 'Hang on a minute,' says Jill. 'We can't deliver presents dressed like this. We need to look more Christmassy.' 'This sounds like a job for the Disguise-o-matic 5000,' I say.

(If you're like most of our readers, you probably know that the Disguise-o-matic 5000 is part of our high-tech detective agency. It has a disguise for every occasion —including a full range of Christmas costumes!) We climb as fast as we can to the detective agency, go through the extensive security protocols to get in, and head straight to the Disguise-o-matic 5000. Jill chooses a Santa suit and puts it on. She walks around patting her belly and saying, 'Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas!'