Read The Yeti Uprising: An IPMA Adventure for Christmas 2013 Page 25

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  Agent Bartholomew was quite sure Hattie would be safe in the number three control room, while he completed his mission. After exiting the booth he checked for straggler Yeti, but they all of them seemed distracted with the onset of the very peculiar aurora borealis, even the ones that had seemingly been maintaining their employment with Belschnikel during the occupation of the facility. Even Bartholomew himself was struck with a sense of wonder at how brilliant the streams were, even having seen them a few times in his far northern US home. They seemed lace with images, movies almost, of various children and objects moving around and playing and such. It seemed so happy, even the gruff old agent got lost in the visage. But a brief few seconds later and he was on the move again.

  This time little prevented him from making a flat out run to the far end of the production facility. He had several hundred feet to go but none of the Yeti, even those that happened to realize he was there, cared enough to prevent him.

  At the back of the building, he then ran across the face of the closed rear door and took nearly another couple minutes to make it across the breadth of it. On the opposite side he ran into the door control room’s own closed door…and it did not budge. He’d stubbed his toe and nearly flattened his nose on the surface of it when the knob refused to budge.

  Bartholomew stepped back and rubbed his chin for a minute contemplating how energetic he was feeling. Should he try to bust the observation windows on the front of the control booth open? Or was he a little too tired for that? They were quite thick, after all. Fortunately the blast shields they’d found on the village side door control room had not been lowered, so it might be doable.

  Then he remembered his shimmer stone he received from Peter when he gave the younger agent his anti-enchantment stone. Perhaps he could trick the two Yeti he could see inside trying to peer out through the windows to come outside.

  With several waves of his hand Bartholomew managed to turn the two creatures inside the booth invisible, and he waited. Within a few seconds the little twerps seemed to realize they could no longer see each other and had a bit of a panic attack. There were rumblings and growls and Yeti chattering. Apparently the effect was dis-settling and they had managed to get ahold of each other despite the invisibility to start a tussle about it. Perhaps they were arguing about which one caused it. But soon the door opened, and Agent B could hear first one set of tiny feet pattering away down the metal grate stairs into a lower working area of the facility, and a few seconds later a second set of feet padded away too.

  Bartholomew entered the control room and punched the controls to open the facility rear door. This time, though it was still a painfully slow process, the giant doorway opening upwards was an advantage.

  Santa flew the helicopter towards the far end of the facility and hovered around just far enough away from the doorway that Bartholomew could see the aurora. So did thousands of Yeti. Once they realized the source of the display had moved eastward out beyond the building they all started clambering towards the door Bartholomew opened and outwards onto the frozen icescape of the arctic.

  It took several minutes, but by the time twelve had passed, Bartholomew felt it was safe to close the giant facility doorway. The production facility was oddly very quiet. It echoed his footsteps as he exited the control room. Then, off in the distance he saw Hattie waving her hands just outside her aerial door control booth and shouting that they had done it.

  As he caught his breath and started making his way back to Hattie he heard occasional noises and metal clanking on metal. It appeared they may not have entirely vacated the Yeti from the building one-hundred percent. But it was certainly a huge improvement, and the building was under their control again. Such as it was.

  Rubbish and torn wrappings were strewn everywhere. About a third of the collection of presents in various piles through the facility looked to have been opened up by the little faerie hoodlums. Belschnikel, it became clear, had a lot of work to do in only three days’ time or less.