world, and he can’t be hurt.
Michelle gave it her best, blasting him off his feet a dozen times with her explosive bubbles, but once all her fat had melted off there was nothing more she could do. Tiffani was useless, but then, Tiffani is always useless. Makes no difference what the challenge is, that’s the one thing we can count on. Drummer Boy might have been able to help, but he had no idea who he was facing, so he rushed in stupid and got pounded. He may be strong, but he’s not Golden Boy strong. You can’t outpunch Jack Braun. DB would have known if he’d ever read a history book, but he’d rather spend his time banging drums and girls. How can you be a wild card and not know about the Four Aces, though? That’s like not knowing about Jetboy.
Looking back, I suppose I was as much to blame as any of them. I was the only one who had a chance against Golden Boy. All I needed to do was stay out of his reach with my jetpack and take him down with sleeping gas. Jack Braun may be invulnerable, but he still needs to breathe. Only he caught my gas canister and chucked it back at me, and I was the one who went to sleep. It could have worked, though. It would have worked if DB and Michelle had distracted Braun long enough for me to hit him with the sleeping gas when he wasn’t looking. If the Diamonds were a real team, that’s how we would have done it.
And now they’ve voted Bubbles off. That’s not fair at all. She was the only one of us who gave Golden Boy any real problems. Her mistake was trusting Tiffani. I tried to warn her, but no one ever listens to me around here. Tiffani was the one who should have been discarded. She turns to diamond and she stands around and glitters, but what good is that? Blrr and the Maharajah would have been a lot more use against Golden Boy, and maybe even Ivan could have helped with all his little Ivans, but thanks to Tiffani they’re all gone, and now Bubbles is gone too.
I’ll be next, I know. Tiffani and Drummer Boy will vote me off the next time we lose a challenge, and how can we hope to win when one third of our team is Sparkles McSwine? (That’s what my mother calls her, anyway. Mother says that Tiffani sounds as if she came from Dogpatch, which is a place in some old funny papers).
It would different if they would ever let me use my powers. That’s another thing that’s unfair, the way these challenges are all set up to be last-minute things, so we never have any time to prepare. I can fly with my jetboots and my backpack, sure, and I have my guns, my jetnet and my sleeping gas . . . but that’s not half of what I could do if they’d only give me a chance. I’m an inventor, a scientist. Maybe I haven’t ever gone to science school or college, but my father subscribed to Popular Mechanics and so did his father before him, so I have issues going back to before Jetboy, and I’ve read them all. Give me a little time in the shop, and I can tinker up all sorts of gadgets and machines to help us with these challenges.
They don’t want that, though. I offered to fix our Diamond Hummer up with jets, so we could fly to the challenges, but no, Tiffani threw Jetdog in my face and convinced the others that they didn’t want a flying car. It’s true that my inventions can’t be duplicated, and that most of them only work when I’m around to run them, but I would have been the one flying the Hummer, and it could have given us a real edge.
There’s rumors going around the lair that the producers have some big twist coming up soon, that they mean to reshuffle all the remaining contestants into new teams, or bring back some of the Discards. I hope it’s true. Some good people have been discarded, and they deserve a second chance, and I know I’d like to get away from Tiffani and Drummer Boy. Put me on a real team, and there’s no telling how much I’ll be able to do. I’d love to be able to win that million dollars. I’d buy