"Yo, Nic." Her brother, Sean, had wandered into the kitchen. He lifted a casual hand in greeting as if he made interplanetary phone calls to her every day and took a big swig from a bottle of soft drink.Then he wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and sat down on a chair, putting his feet on the table. "How's it going? Have they figured out yet that they messed up big-time and they should have sent me? What's this top secret mission all about, anyway? Don't worry, your secret is safe with me."
Suddenly a man wearing a dark suit, sunglasses, and an earpiece appeared in the kitchen and put his hands flat across the screen.
"Security breach, security breach," he said. "No requests for details of the mission! We're shutting you down."
"Bye, Mom! Bye, Dad! Bye, Sean!" shouted Nicola trying to see her family through the man's pudgy fingers.
"EAT SOME SARDINES BEFORE YOUR MISSION!" cried her mother. "And don't forget to say 'THANK YOU FOR HAVING ME'!"
"DON'T LET ANYBODY PUSH YOU AROUND!" called her father. "Remember you're BOB BERRY'S DAUGHTER and you can DO ANYTHING!"
"SHOOT TO KILL, NIC!" yelled Sean.
The screen went fuzzy.
"Oh," said Nicola sadly. "They're gone."
Right then, she could think of nothing more wonderful than to be home in her own kitchen with her mom, dad, Sean, and that wrinkled ordinary old apple.
Mully put her arm around Nicola's shoulders.
"It sounds to me like you've got a lovely supportive family," she said. "Although I really wouldn't recommend you kill Princess Petronella--that's just my little tip. Now,
I had a nice chat with your mom before you got on the phone and I've had the Telepathy Chef prepare a wonderful breakfast for you--sardine cereal with sardine milk and a nice tall glass of sardine juice! Nicola, what is it? Are you okay? Your face has turned bright green."
CHAPTER 12
"Your appointment at the palace is at ten o'clock, so we should be there in plenty of time." Georgio turned the keys in the ignition of his aero-car. "I've allowed twenty minutes to get there, twenty minutes for traffic, twenty minutes in case the car breaks down and we have to hail an aero-cab, twenty minutes in case something goes wrong, twenty minutes in case something else goes wrong, and another ten minutes just to be on the safe side. Oh dear, I do hope we're not late!"
"I'm sure we're going to be very early," said Nicola. It seemed like Georgio was even more nervous than she.
"Oh yes! No need to get yourself worked up, Nicola," said Georgio. "I've allowed plenty of time for us to get there.You just try to relax."
Nicola sucked on one of the cake-pops that Shimlara had given her to take away the taste of her sardine-flavored breakfast. It was a lollipop that looked like a miniature chocolate mud cake and tasted like one, too. It made her feel much better.
Nicola smoothed her hands over her skirt and wondered if she was dressed appropriately.The Wardrobewhizonic Ladies had been around to help her get dressed for her meeting with Princess Petronella, and there had been a lot of arguments over how she should be dressed. Mully thought she should still be dressed like a princess, in a similar dress to the day before. Georgio thought she should be dressed like a professional ambassador in a crisp dark suit with a string of pearls and a clipboard. Shimlara thought Nicola should look tough and scary, with a pierced nose and eyebrow and lots of black eyeliner, so that Princess Petronella would be intimidated into doing whatever Nicola wanted.
In the end the Wardrobewhizonics had come up with a combination of all three. Nicola was wearing combat boots and a ripped denim skirt, a long-sleeved white shirt done up in a knot at her waist, her countdown watch, a string of pearls, and tiny sparkly diamond clips all through her hair, and she was carrying a leather-bound clipboard.
"Perfect!" Shimlara had said. "You look like a tough, funky, businesslike Earthling princess."
But Nicola quickly forgot all about her outfit as she suddenly experienced the strange sensation of a car lifting straight into the air. She looked out the window and saw they were about ten feet above the ground.
There was no steering wheel in the aero-car. Instead Georgio sat behind a computer screen and tapped it every now and then with his fingertip.
"Left!" he muttered. "I tapped left--why are you going right?"
The car skimmed gently along without the bother of traffic lights or stop signs.They turned a corner and suddenly a yellow aero-car appeared from nowhere.
"KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE AIR-ROAD, BOOFHEAD!" shouted Georgio, but the yellow car slammed straight into theirs.
Nicola threw her hands over her face and waited for the terrible jolt. She'd never been in a car accident before and she suspected it would hurt, but the yellow car just bounced gently off them like a rubber ball, and the driver of the yellow car, a woman with a bright red flower behind her ear, grinned and shook her finger at Georgio as she flew past them.
"Isn't your car damaged?" asked Nicola.
"All our cars are made from Bounce-a-Guard," explained Georgio. "If we run into someone we just bounce off each other. Not a scratch, except to our pride! I do wonder why your planet is still making cars from that dreadful hard steel and glass and the like--then you get so upset and surprised when people are hurt in car accidents!"
"I don't think that bouncy stuff has been invented on Earth yet," said Nicola.