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// I Chime In With An "O'Malley, Open The Goddamn Doors!" 
// Story: Looks Like I'm Gonna Have To Start Trying 
// by marmalado 
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One can't really expect much from O'Malley. He was a kid who keeps a sword nearly taller than his person in his pants. (He tried hiding them in the hammerspace spine, and ended up getting stabbed.) Or from a kid who doesn't know his right from his left. (He fell asleep during that lesson at the Odd Squad Academy.) In terms of his occupation, he was merely there to do a job. Sit in a chair, press buttons to make sure his coworkers went through a series of tubes, and access the other series of tubes with the question of "can children get pilonidal cysts?" followed by massive doomscrolling. All while getting paid absolutely nothing. Canada was weird with the whole "free child labor" thing. He didn't understand it, and he didn't really care, because that meant he could apply for a job at the Shmumbermart and actually earn a living wage.

But even though he wasn't getting paid, he still had loyalty to Ms. O.

She was tough. Ruled with an iron fist. Could paralyze a man simply by twisting the wrist. Could probably commit genocide if she really wanted to. Really, with her outclassing him by strength and hierarchy, he had to respect her. In Precinct 13579, it was just basic common sense to respect your Ms. or Mr. O. Call them by their title, not by their name. If they order you to do something, do it. And if you're pro-oddness, you're as good to Odd Squad as dog poop on an island.

So what if Ms. O didn't know he existed? He was employed under an organization where she was the boss and he was the runt. The motto of "All Kids Are Equal, All Kids Belong" applied to DEI rates, not hierarchy.

On this particular day, though, he was in a festive mood. Today was the day of Ms. O's surprise birthday party, a planned celebration whose knowledge started with Oscar, got passed on to Olive, then got passed on to every agent in the precinct sans Otto, who was deemed guilty by reason of loose lips and kept out of the loop until the day of. Planning a party for the boss seems simple on paper, but O'Malley had heard it was tougher in execution. Something about Oscar sending Ms. O to an auto body shop to work on a few cars with the reward of finding a juice box somewhere under one of the hoods. The juice box was a lie, of course, but it was a better idea than having her go over to the liquor outlet and letting her become a wino. (And yes, he was pretty confident she was legally old enough to drink. What alcohol did to a kid's body, though, he left up to those in the Medical department of Odd Squad.)

But, in a cliche he really should have seen coming, things went downhill fast.

"O'Malley!"

The young tube operator rushed over to Oscar. "Yeah?"

"It's Ms. O. She's back. Early."

"With a car?"

"I- n- w- maybe? I mean maybe the guy gave her one, she's probably old enough to drive..." Oscar furiously shook his head. "Anyway, forget about that. You need to stall her."

O'Malley blinked. With no lack of incredulity, "You really think that'll work?"

"It's better than her coming in here and ruining the surprise!" Oscar made a shooing motion with his hands. "Go, hurry!"

"How am I gonna-"

"Hurry!!"

And that's how O'Malley found himself rushing through the halls, having near-collisions with his coworkers while listening to the frantic banging of balled-up fists on two steel sliding doors. He was genuinely surprised the doors weren't ripped clear off already, but maybe Ms. O wasn't too keen on making any dynamic entries today.

"O'Malley, is that you?"

He stopped and stiffened.

"Can you open the door? I have to put my new Subaru Impreza somewhere and I'm not finding any good spaces here."

"You got the car that lesbians drive?"

"It's the one that had the juice box in it. Lesbian car or not, it's lucky and I've got a valid driver's license." A pause. "Though vehicular sexualities would be a first for me in terms of odd cases...but I digress. Get me inside."

"All right, all right, hold on..."

Reaching behind his back and pulling out his tablet was more of a frantic move than anything. He had no idea what he was supposed to do here. The tube lobby was his workplace-inside-of-a-workplace, but the only people he'd ever have to stop from leaving it were villains, and Ms. O was definitely not a villain.

After a minute of letting the gears in his head turn, he came upon a solution.

Pressing the lock button caused three beeps to resound, followed by an automatic recording: "All doors locked."

"Did you just lock the doors on me?!"

"N-no! It was, uhh...it was a m-malfunction. Yeah. The doors haven't been working right since you left and I've been trying to fix them ever si-"

"Hi! Oh, no, Oscar called me. I'm on my way in now. Those stairs are torture, though. Ever think of putting in an elevator? One decked in pink?"

O'Malley knew that voice. It was distant, but he knew whose voice it was all the same. Ms. O didn't have half the hearing ability he did, and that was one of the things he was thankful for. Dr. O pinned it on good genetics at his last physical exam.

"O'Malley! What's going on out there?"

His attention was brought back to the current situation. Acting on the first thing he thought of, he decided to curl his hand up into a fist and repeatedly bang on the door in a pale imitation of a hammer. It was better than being a one-man band with imitating the sounds of a construction site, because who was going to believe there was a construction site with only one person on duty? Even the precinct's Maintenance team didn't have one kid on duty at a time.

"I-I'm fixing it! Fixing...fixing...fixing..."

He could hear slurping from behind the door. Her juice box wouldn't hold her for much longer. And if she didn't somehow, by some stroke of bad luck, have another one tucked away in her hammerspace spine...well, it'd be his little body getting throttled.

His body, and the bodies of everyone else in the bullpen.





"Forget it, I'll open this stupid thing myself!"

He took away his fist for only a second, just to shake his hand out because it was getting sore. The words Ms. O had said went past him like a gust of wind.

And then the creaking started.

The dangerous sparks nearly hit his eye, and he yelped as he scrambled down the stepstool and took a step back. All he could do in the moment was stare. This girl was prying apart doors that were ten tons each. Which, to any experienced agent, wasn't all too impressive of a feat from someone who could lift up cars made for adults, but still shook O'Malley just on the sheer basis that he had never even seen such raw strength. At least he had the decency to use a sword when slaying dragons. His boss would rather go for the spine or the neck with her own two hands.

Snapping back to reality, his throat ran dry. He had to think of something fast. If Ms. O got even an inch past the doors that held her back, there would be no stopping her.

So he decided that re-closing the doors while they still could be closed was the next viable option. It, at the very least, gave him some time to warn Oscar and the others that a threat to their existences was dangerously close to breaking free of confinement.

"Oscar, Oscar!"

"What is it, O'Malley?"

"She...she's opening the doors."

"Did you not lock the-"

"With her hands."

Out of the corner of his eye, O'Malley saw Otto's jaw drop, his head turn to give an incredulous look of "that has to be impossible on some level of science" at Olive, and then it move back to him. If he wasn't careful, he'd get a tiny dragon in his mouth. O'Malley had seen that happen once. Poor agent was breathing fire for days. But that wasn't the issue right now.

Oscar's expression was roughly the same as Otto's, just with an industrial-size level of despair. "O'Malley, are you aware those doors weigh ten tons each?"

"For a total of twenty tons? Yeah. I know." O'Malley resisted giving an eye roll. "I sealed them shut for now, but she's going to try again. The Maintenance people are really gonna have a field day if she breaks them."

"Oh God, and we're still not ready..." Oscar took off his glasses and stared despondently at the floor for all of half a second before he made eye contact with his coworker again. "Wait. The tubes are connected to the Creature Room, right? Just send in a creature to stall her in the meantime!"

"Are you serious?! You want me to make her angrier?!" O'Malley cried. "If she breaks through those doors and gets in here, we're all dead!"

"Says the kid who slays dragons as a hobby!"

As much as he would have loved to butt heads with one of the more annoying children he had met in his short life thus far, O'Malley had to bite back one hell of a pithy remark for Oren. He settled for bared teeth and a stink-eye instead.

Oscar rubbed his forehead. "Okay, okay, then, uh...how about alternate dimensions? Do the tubes connect to those?"

"Tube 2 does."

"Good! Send in something from an alternate dimension to distract her. Not enough to kill her, but enough to give her a good fight. There has to be something out there like that."

Briefly, O'Malley tried to scan through the contents of his tablet in his mind, and found that his memory wasn't that expansive. Still, it had to have an Alternate Dimensions section listed somewhere -- they taught that at the Academy and everything. The question, then, was what alternate dimension he had to contact and pull beings out of.

"Go! Now!"

That was the sole command he needed to hit the ground running, not noticing Oscar's dramatic pout that was somewhere between "upset" and "on the verge of a grand panic attack".





By the time O'Malley got back to the doors again, they were ajar by several inches and counting, sparks raining to the ground. He could hear the sound of effort coming from his boss, and he could swear he saw her face becoming as red as an average Target store.

Not red with effort, though. Effort was something she didn't need. 

No, it was red with rage. Which came through in a screeching demand. 

"O'Malley, you'd better open these doors or I-"

The doors hissed closed before the tube operator could hear the rest of the possible-maybe-yeah-it's-definitely-a-death threat. He knew what would be haunting his dreams tonight, by a landslide. But as he scanned through the tablet to find the Alternate Dimensions section and tapped on it, he didn't have time to think about what alternate dimension he would use.

He ran on the hastily-cobbled-together logic of "cute name, deadly villains".

"My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" was certainly a cute name. Too girly for his taste, though. And something that saccharine had to have some dark and disturbing villains to counteract it.

...Oh God. It took him three flicks of his finger, and he wasn't even down the whole list.

Frantic pounding came from the other side of the door.

Gritting his teeth, he tapped on a name at random, grabbed a tissue from his pocket to wipe the forming sweat off of his forehead, and slunk down to the floor with an anxiety-packed sigh, setting the tablet beside him.

This had to work. There had to be some villain in this dimension that could beat his boss, and whoever he picked was it. Even if it was a spur-of-the-moment pick, and even if Ms. O had sugar as a major part of her diet, her energy couldn't last forever.

Yeah, he had this in the bag. And as for the party? Ah, he'd leave that one up to Oscar, Polly Graph, and the others. They had things covered.