Preparations complete, Fie and her friends set off for town again. “We’re running an errand for Sir Crow!” Fie called as she ran through the gates, brimming with confidence and bearing her legitimate permission slip and her decidedly less-so excuse.
“Time to catch this Bruce M’chouchouteman,” said Slad. This time, they were fully kitted out with ropes to catch him if he tried to run.
“Are you okay with that, Slad?” Fie asked him. “Catching him, I mean.”
“I don’t care. If anything, if we do catch him, he’ll be able to explain himself. Then you’ll all understand that it was a big mistake.”
Well, apart from Slad, the squires felt united by their common goal.
Before long, they arrived at the southwestern corner of the city. Regretting the disastrous events of the previous evening, the squires moved in complete silence to avoid guards and town teens alike, as it had been the boys who had brought the wrath of Marth down upon them in the first place. Whenever he found them, he took them under his wing for their own protection, gave them a stern talking to, and sent them home. (And considering how many of them there were, he must have had quite the busy time of it.)
Fie and her group’s goal was to catch Bruce M’chouchouteman in the act and arrest him, which required them to be around when he targeted his next victim. According to Captain Yore’s reports, the teens tended to be attacked when no one else was around. Thus, Fie and her group tailed the teens whenever they split off from their groups and went home.
“I don’t know if this will really work...” Gees muttered.
“We have no choice,” Fie whispered back as they stealthily tailed yet another lone boy. “This is our only option, and the rest is up to luck.”
The boy turned down a moonlit alleyway, taking a shortcut back to his house. Suddenly, there was a burst of cackling laughter. Slad’s eyes grew wide. “That’s Bruce M’chouchouteman’s laugh!” he said. “‘B(ruce)wa ha ha ha!’ That’s exactly how it’s written in the magazine!”
Alarmed, the boy spun around, looking for the source of the laughter. “Wh-What is that?!” he cried. Behind him appeared a masked figure in a top hat who sprayed him in the eyes with some sort of liquid. The boy cried out in pain and clutched his face. It must have been the same lemon juice as last time, Fie judged. Then the mystery man pushed the boy to the ground and began stripping necklaces and bangles off of him.
“I knew it!” Fie cried. “Bruce M’chouchouteman is a thief!”
Slad groaned. “No... I can’t believe he’s a villain after all...”
The boy’s valuables now in his possession, Bruce M’chouchouteman nimbly skipped away, scurried up the side of the building, and vanished over the rooftops. “After him!” Fie cried. She and her companions chased him to the edge of the neighborhood where the phantom figure, unaware of them, stopped in his tracks in a deserted area just before the bad part of town.
Slad, having regained his determination during the chase, whooped, “All right! Can we catch him, Heath?”
However, Remie stopped him. “Hold on,” he said. “Someone’s coming.”
Two low-level punks swaggered up to Bruce M’chouchouteman. Neither appeared surprised to see him; in fact, they spoke to him as if he was one of their number.
One of the punks snickered. “So how’d it go?” he said. “You get a good haul?”
Bruce M’chouchouteman spoke, his voice as pitiful as any of these wannabe gangsters. “You know it, Boss.”
The man called Boss looked over the finds and crowed, “Now that’s what I’m talking about. We sell this and we’re making the big money, boys.”
The other man, apparently his henchman, chimed in, “You’re a genius, Boss. You were right—you really can make a killing off of robbing those dumb rich kids. Plus, by adding in that whole stupid Bruce M’chouchouteman thing, the kids think some kinda legend is robbing ’em, and they don’t tip off the army. They don’t even try to stop us ‘til we’re already gone. Now that’s what I call smart thinkin.’”
“And don’t you forget it.” Boss snickered.
Now Fie and her crew understood everything: Bruce M’chouchouteman was a fraud! He was nothing more than part of a scheme for small-time robbers to steal jewelry from these wealthy teenagers.
“How dare they...” Fie growled. How dare they disguise themselves as this figure of the squires’ dreams! How dare they target innocent children (no matter how foolish said children may have been)! And most of all, how dare they be just a bunch of two-bit robbers who wouldn’t make her big even if she did arrest them all!
Furious, Fie’s gang leaped to their feet. “We heard everything, you punks!” Fie roared. “You have a lot of nerve if you think you can disguise yourself as Bruce M’chouchouteman and steal from these kids!” Drawing their wooden practice swords, the group rushed at the punks.
“Wha—?!” Boss cried. “What’re these squires doing here?”
The henchman only yelped in fright as the squires descended upon them and finished both punks off, one after the other. However, the person dressed as Bruce M’chouchouteman evaded all their attacks; he might have been nothing more than a lowly grunt, but he was certainly athletic. Some people, Fie thought, had a lot more skill than befit their morality or status in life, often to the detriment of those around them.
Driven back by their attacks, the man stumbled and collided with a teenage girl hanging out with her friends nearby. The girl screamed as he yanked out a knife from his pocket and brandished it at her throat. “Stay back!” he warned. “Or the girl gets it!”
Fie and the others were stunned. This was bad, they knew, but they hurried to reason with him. “C-Calm down!” Remie said. “There’s no need to take a hostage!”
“He’s right,” said Gormus. “Use your brain. If we take you in now, the worst that can happen is that’ll you be charged with robbery. But if you hurt her, you could end up getting the death penalty!”
However, the man was already so agitated and so mean-spirited that he refused to care. “Shut up!” he roared. “Shut up, shut up! Stay back! Just leave me alone!” He flailed with the knife, forcing them away. At this distance, even Queen couldn’t get an attack in. Sweat flowed down Fie’s back. I have to do something, she thought.
Yet just then, a figure descended behind the man and his hostage. The moonlight gleamed off of his top hat, cape, and masquerade mask.
Fie and her friends screamed as one, “I-It’s Bruce M’chouchouteman!”
Sensing someone behind him, the robber whirled, knife at the ready. “Who are you?!” he bellowed.
The second Bruce M’chouchouteman danced past the knife and blew a liquid all over the man. The man yelped and pawed at his eyes, whereupon the second Bruce M’chouchouteman capitalized on this opportunity by sweeping the knife out of his hands and jamming a knee into the man’s solar plexus. The man went down as Fie and her friends ran over to the girl and quickly surrounded her.
“Th-There are two Bruce M’chouchoutemen...” Slad whispered.
“But this one is a fake, isn’t he?” said Remie, ‘this one’ being the disguised robber who was now lying on the ground unconscious, of course.
“Th-Then does that mean that one’s real?” Fie whispered. Slack-jawed, she and her friends gaped at the newly appeared Bruce M’chouchouteman as he sailed to the rooftop and vanished into the night.
Later, Fie’s gang received a small bit of recognition for stopping the robbers, but as they hadn’t managed to bring in the real Bruce M’chouchouteman, no one believed them when they claimed to have seen him. Alas, Fie’s chance of going big had slipped through her fingers.
✦ ✦ ✦
Marth sighed as he returned home from another long day of work. Thanks to the arrest of the robbery ring, the public now cared more than ever about the security of their neighborhoods, leading to fewer teens hanging around outside at night. However, all the usual suspects remained, which left him with no less work than usual. Still, maybe this was a good thing. Children needed to make mistakes under the watchful guidance of adults in order to grow; that was the very thing he loved about his job.
After taking a break for a cup of coffee, he crossed to his closet and opened it. “I can’t believe I have to wear this thing yet again.” He groaned. There, neatly put away, lay a top hat, a black cloak, and a masquerade mask.
Back when he worked in another part of the city, there was a similar incident with teens hanging around outside when they shouldn’t have. Therefore, in an attempt to curtail them, the department he belonged to decided to create a legend, a masked man who stalked the streets at night to blow lemon juice at naughty children and teens...Bruce M’chouchouteman. The job of blowing a harmless liquid on the teens to scare them into going home fell to him. Naturally, he tired of this position before long, but when he applied to transfer to a different role, his captain said he was the only one in the department capable of doing it. He had hoped he’d never have to use this wretched costume again, but alas, fate had other plans for him.
Marth smiled bitterly and closed the closet door. Adults made mistakes sometimes too. Let the kids grow up in their own time, he thought.