Tucker and Spud Appreciation: An essay by me apparently.
Tucker leaned back in his chair, “-and that's why we're no longer welcome at that gas station.”
Spud had a wide eyed look of wonder, “Woah man…….That takes some skill.”
“Thank you!” Tucker gestured wildly on his side of the screen. “Sam called me and Danny menaces but she's the one who brought the mace!”
Spud nodded. “It really was a team effort.” He flipped through his notebook, “Anyways how’s the progress on your side? I managed to crack into some uh, supplies and shipment invoices?”
Spud wrote down some notes, before clicking through a couple of the unlocked files on his computer, squinting at the screen.
Tucker groaned as his chair hit the ground, “Man I keep telling the guys hacking isn't like the movies make it out to be. Like yeah, if I got a back door planted I can get in and out no problem. But straight up hacking a new system?”
“The problems with being the smart ones on the team,” Spud said.
“I managed to get some payroll documents, and some employee work times I think?” Tucker blew a raspberry as he typed a few more lines of code, “All fake names. I doubt a place employs 23 different J. Doe's.”
“John, Jane, Janet, Jake, Joseph, Josie,” Spud recited.
Tucker snorted, “Yeah pretty much.”
Spud hummed before something dinged on his side, “Huh. That might be something.”
Tucker cracked his knuckles, “Share with me?”
Spud copied a few of the files before sending them over. “Hang on, I gotta check something.”
Tucker saw Spud disappear off the side of the screen, but could hear him rooting through some papers.
He looked over the information, scrolling through the various invoices. “Dude what are you seeing that I'm not? It's just the shipping invoices for a bunch of different places.”
Spud came back carrying five different notebooks, of varying sizes. “You may be better at hacking, but I'm better with the information man.”
He waved one of the notebooks, “I started helping Jake keep track of the various magic communities around, you know, to help with his duties when they kicked up.”
“Dude, that is so baller of you.”
“Heh, thanks.” He cracked open the notebook and pulled a highlighter out of a cup. He started marking the notebook as he scrolled through the files. “Anyways, I thought I recognized a couple of the areas some of the buildings were placed in annnnnnnd…..”
Spud furrowed his brow and grabbed another notebook, flipping it through it real quick. “What are some of those shipments carrying?”
Tucker started scrolling through his own files, “Uhhhh looks like…..lots of metal and rubber. Toilet paper, paper towels, napkins, and a frankly concerning amount of coffee. Office supplies, like so much office supplies and-”
Tucker winced. “Oh man, and a lot of chemicals I recognize from the Fenton's lab.”
“Yeah but see this?” Spud frowned as he tapped the screen, “These shipments are labeled as various different glass equipment shipments. And it's doubled every other month or so.”
“Could be they're using a lot of the equipment.” Tucker said, “We know they're testing facilities. But you wouldn't be singling those out if that were the case.”
“It's the fact it's double shipments of glass, so the handling of them would be different from most supplies to handle the fragile equipment. And the extra shipments have different weights to them as opposed to the originals they're copying.”
“That sounds super sus.”
“Yeah. What makes it more sus is the fact that the sketchy glass shipments originate from B.U.G.S facilities, rather than outside suppliers like the office supplies and the original glass shipments. Now it could be explained as them having the shipments sent to a warehouse, before dishing it out to other nearby facilities, but there's no record or paper trail that shows that. From what I can tell, the sketchy shipments just appear in the records, before being sent out to a different facility, where it immediately disappears.”
Tucker leaned back, suddenly aware that they were stumbling over something bad. “And considering what we know about them, after the guys stumbled across that one……”
Spud stared at the files on screen, “It could just be magical artifacts. But the more likely explanation is they're catching magical creatures.”
The two of them sat in a heavy silence for a moment.
“How sure of this are you?” Tucker asked. “I mean, the magical world would notice the disappearances right? They would have got a hold of Jake or Lao Shi or someone.”
Spud shook his head and held up his notebook. “All the facilities manage to fall near a cluster of magical communities, that's what I was checking. And like I said, the shipments originate in one facility and then get shipped to a completely different one. Never the same one consecutively, and it's spaced out over years. If a bunch of creatures goes missing, yeah someone's going to notice.”
“But if just one goes missing,” Tucker continued, “It's just an unrelated tragedy.”
Spud set down his highlighter and rubbed his eyes, “And it's not impossible. The Huntsclan has managed to kidnap several magical creatures at once for years for their hunting games.”
“Ugh!” Tucker shuddered. “I do not like the implications of that.”
“Yeah, Jake got caught once. There were about four or five others with him, and they were all misfits to their species, and not well liked so most of their neighbors and families just assumed they ran off or had unfortunate accidents.”
“That's……”
“Yeah.”
Tucker stared at his computer, something twisting in his stomach as he stared at all the locked files he still hadn't managed to get into.
“We can't tell them.”
Spud snapped his head up to look at Tucker incredulously, “What?!?! We have to!”
Tucker shook his head frantically, “We can't. You know the guys as well as I do, we tell them what we found and they're going to go tackle the places right away. This is so much bigger than we thought and in so many places. They barely got out last time and that was with the element of surprise and them not knowing about what they can do.”
“It's basically the same as the GIW! You guys deal with them all the time!”
“It's not the same! The GIW have a single base, with maybe 20 guys working there! I've been tracking them and their branch since they first showed up in Amity and they don't go anywhere else. This is the only branch of the GIW. They barely manage to capture the little blobs or ectopusses, and even then those ghosts escape on their own before I even get the alert about them!”
Tucker pushed away from the desk to start pacing across his floor. “These guys have buildings across the country! That one building had about 50 people working for it and that's not even going into all their bosses. They've been operating for years without anybody catching on! And we don't know what they're capable of! They had something that blocked Danny’s powers, and we still don't know what did it. This is so much bigger than what we usually deal with. We have to wait, get some more information, get some more help-”
“Yeah, like telling everybody!” Spud yelled, “This shouldn't even be an argument, Tucker!”
Tucker stared at the floor, pulling his hat down to where Spud couldn't see his eyes. He was silent for a moment.
“......If we tell them right now, they'll get in over their heads and they'll get hurt and I can't-” Tucker's voice broke.
He took a breath, rubbing his face before looking back at Spud. “I am not sending Danny into a place where they'd turn him into a lab rat.”
“Tucker-”
“All I'm saying is we have to wait.” Tucker interrupted. “We wait, we get more info, we try and get the magical communities more wary around those areas.”
“I don't want to lie to them.”
“I know. Ancients, I know.” Tucker crossed his arms, “But we gotta be smart about this. Are you with me Spud?”
Spud let out a sigh as he slumped in his chair. “... Yeah. Yeah I'm with ya. Let the record show I hate this though.”
“You and me both.” Tucker muttered, “Anyways, plans?”
“You keep hacking into the information.” Spud said. “Send me everything you get and I'll start cross-referencing with the known magical communities when I get them. In the meantime I'll talk to Fu Dawg. He's got a ton of connections and can start spreading the word.”
“What about Lao Shi?”
“I'll talk to him, but I want some more information first.”
“You don't think he'll believe you?”
“No he will. But he'll want to take it straight to the Dragon Council.” Spud scoffed, “It's them I'm worried about.”
The two of them sat there for a moment before Spud said, “This sucks.”
Tucker started giggling, “Understatement man. But we got this. Someone has to protect those losers.”
“Heck yeah man!” Spud held up a fist to the camera, and Tucker did the same as the two of them did their virtual secret handshake.
Someone had to have the heroes’ backs after all.