Chapter Text
“Bear Trap, in the car, digging for treasure, BRING A MASK.”
She wasn’t sure how excited to be, but she was quick to close the store and hop into the back of Car Crash’s truck. Spike passing her kitchen gloves felt like a bad sign, but Giovanni had said treasure, and that didn’t seem like the kind of thing he’d like about. They rolled through the neighborhood with no seat belts, or seats, like rebels or southerners, until they arrived at an old house with two cars in the driveway and a crumbling retaining wall around the yard. Car Crash pulled the truck up behind the two parked cards and only just tapped the bumpers.
“All right,” he said, “This is Aunt Becky’s house. Goggles on.”
Everybody’s Banzai Blaster goggles went up, and Molly knew for sure something was going down when Giovanni donned his own. “Boss…?”
“You get temporary gear!” Giovanni popped a pair of sea monster swim goggles onto her face. “Here, my old attack mask. Get those on tight, and put your mask on already!”
And, well, she did, but she had questions, so many questions. “Um, what exactly-”
“Briefing at the door, Bear Trap!” Giovanni pulled up his mask- it was flower print- and pulled her out of the back of the truck like a baby.
There was, indeed, a briefing at the door, but it was the back door and Car Crash doing the briefing. He spoke up through his mask- plain black- while tensely gripping the wobbling doorknob. “All right, guys, we have Uncle Wade’s blessing, but not a lot of time while Aunt Becky’s at bridge club. Avoid the living room and anything in direct line of sight. It’s anything you can grab in whatever containers you can carry out. Quantity, not quality.”
“Woah, wait,” Molly interrupted. “Are we stealing from an old lady?!”
“No, Bear Trap, we’re treasure hunting,” corrected Giovanni. “Stealing implies that she’ll miss anything we take.”
“But-”
“Trust me; you’ll get it.”
And then Car Crash opened the door. Light crept into the house in little increments, like a mold taking over a loaf of bread. Mountains, literal mountains and valleys and foothills of things built up in furniture-swallowing piles, filling the house to the walls. They blocked the windows. They gave off a mist of dust. Molly couldn’t even tell where the room began and ended from her eyes dancing all over all of the stuff.
Molly screamed, “Holy toledo!”
“Banzai Blasters!” Giovanni hollered. “Break!”
Everyone rushed in past her. She hesitated long enough for the smell, the old and half-rotten smell, to hit her through her mask. She was left scrambling in after them in their wake. She made the mistake of shutting the door after her. It cloaked the room in a suffocating immediate darkness. The only thing that stood out was the bright red of Giovanni’s cape, and she threw herself towards it.
“Wait-” She slipped and landed on the outstretched footrest of a recliner chair held up by a stack of magazines. “Wait! What am I looking for?!”
“Literally anything!” Giovanni called out to her from a corner. “This broad’s a Hoarder Classic! There’s no telling what she- Oo! Yarn! This brand’s normally like twelve dollars a skein!”
Ben hollered from the kitchen. “I have grocery bags!”
“This is why you don’t have a nickname, Ben! You think too small! There’s probably reusable grocery bags! Backpacks! Duffles!”
Molly blinked and tried to make her eyes focus. The piles were starting to shift into their component parts instead of one big mess, but none of the things she could see were interesting to her. There were tons of little porcelain angels on shelves, and so many VHS tapes that they spilled out into the floor like itty bitty Stonehenges. Lots of magazines, lots of house slippers… if she was going to look for things she would-
No, first she needed something to carry her loot in. Prioritize.
Molly dated into the valley of garbage and made her way towards the hall. She barely fit in the corridor of stacked doors. None of them were worth potentially toppling the stacks for. It was mostly microwave cookbooks from the 70s.
Distantly, she heard Crusher shout, “How do I know if a bottle of shampoo’s been opened or not?!”
Spike answered. “Weight! Shake it and see if it slurps! When in doubt, aim for the back of the cabinet!”
Molly needed bedrooms, and the house had a second story. The rest of the Blasters had filed into the first empty room they ran across, but the good stuff was prob-
And then Molly stopped, because she realized she was being methodical in robbing someone’s house.
“Are you guys absolutely sure this is okay?!” she asked the house. “Like, what if I take her favorite teddy bear, or a wedding ring, or something?!”
“We trust your judgment, Bear Trap!” Spike answered. “The fact that you’re asking means you’re not gonna do it!”
“Plus, you see this house?! This woman has a problem!” Giovanni sounded so far away. “Do what you do best!”
Molly hesitated. “… cower?”
“Be smart!”
Right… be smart. She could do that. She had already been doing it! Onto… a bedroom. She put her weight onto a laundry-covered step that turned out to be an unsteady stack of more books beside the actual stairs, but after that terrifying wiggle under her hand, she made her way up to the second floor.
There were three doors: one was a bathroom, one looked like the master bedroom, and one was closed. She went for the closed one, and it wouldn’t open at first. She had to put her whole weight on it and dig her heels into the hardwood floor. It wasn’t stuck, or locked; the other side was just so thick with things that it had to shift to make room for her. By the time she could wiggle her shoulder into the gap, a pile toppled into the new space and wedged the door open. It was mostly shoes. Molly climbed over them and into the room.
Her feet dropped into the strata of shoes like quicksand. She made her way over the mess by sitting on her hip and sliding across it all, a thick layer cake of shoes and hats in loose boxes. Past the barricade at the door, though, she could pick up hints of old humanity. There were posters taped to the wall with peeling painter’s tape, and in the corner, a bed post lay illuminated by a sliver of window shining past a pyramid of longboxes. This had been a kid’s- maybe a teenager’s- room.
Backpacks!
“Gaaah, Ben, get me the shopping bags!” Giovanni rumbled from downstairs. “I can’t hold all this yarn!”
She could hear them so clearly through the heating vents in the wall, it was almost spooky. It was like Ben was laughing condescendingly right in her ear. “Oh, so the mighty boss surrenders to my small thinking?!”
“Shut up, Ben! What do you even have?!”
“Food! Four bags of pretzels, four boxes of Swiss Miss, five jars of peanut butter-”
“No check the expiration date on those! You could get that freaky peanut poisoning!”
“I have a buncha bath bombs, sir!” said Crusher.
Spike almost squealed in joy. “I have an entire suitcase of nothing but old McDonald’s toys! There’s teeny Beanie Babies in here! With tags!”
“Hot damn, Spike, that’s a haul! What about you, Bear Trap?”
Molly had only just started to force the closet door open. With her back against the door jamb and her feet on the door, she pushed. “You guys ever see The Rescuers?”
“What, the movie with the eagle?”
“No, the first one!” she grunted. “Where the little girl’s trapped in the cave full of water and she can’t open the skull with the diamond in it?”
Giovanni sounded alarmed. “Wait, what?! Who has a skull?!”
“Bear Trap, are you okay?” shouted Spike.
That’s when her foot slipped off the door and she dropped hard. It made a ton of noise and wobbled the hell out of the door, but she was still mostly okay. Just a loud landing on a few loose shoes.
She was never going to convince Giovanni, though. “AH! Bear Trap’s down! Abort mission! Recover and evacuate, go go go!”
“Double time to upstairs position!” Crusher hollered.
“BE CAREFUL, the stairs aren’t stairs!” Car Crash warned.
“Guys! I just tripped!” Molly struggled for footing. Her arm kept getting tangled in something every time she tried to move it. She yanked hard to get it free, and what landed in her lap was pink and blue and black and glittery all at once… with straps! “Hey, a backpack!”
“I’m comin’, Bear Trap! Don’t let anything crush you to death!” Giovanni’s arm and half his head met the door. “OW damn it and it just healed from the shovel!”
Molly threw him the backpack. “Look! This whole closet’s full of bags!”
“That’s great, Bear Trap, but-” He cut himself off with a gasp. “This is a Lisa Frank! Like, classic style! Throw me another one!”
Molly blindly reached, grabbed, and threw. The bad didn’t make it the whole way; it was a big heavy duffle with a whale on it. “I think this one’s from an aquarium!”
“Guys, we NEED in this room!” Giovanni ordered. “Everybody clear the door!”
“Clearing the door” meant throwing most of the shoes out into the hallway, but within ten minutes, all the Banzai Blasters were sinking into the quickshoe pit and diving for the closet. Molly just kept digging through that closet, past the bags and into a deeper layer of stuffed animals and Barbies. Harden by retail, she still had a soft spot for toys she didn’t have to pay for. She found herself stuffing her pockets with smaller teddy bears and grabbing a particularly huge one with a missing eye and not letting go.
“Judas Priest t-shirts!” Ben gushed. “Your aunt listens to Judas Priest?!”
“Hell no!” said Car Crash. “But Cousin Lee used to! Look, here’s all their old records- and the record player! The whole thing!”
“Anybody check the longboxes yet?” said Giovanni. “We’ve gotta see what comics we’re dealing with here!”
“On it!” Molly volunteered.
“Good initiative, Bear Trap!” Meanwhile, I’ll be helping myself-” Giovanni squealed. “To the cute little Puumba, look at him with the little bugs in his mouth!”
“Like, I hate to fit the stereotype, but has anyone else actually looked at the shoes?” Spike asked. “Yeah they’re all secondhand, but there’s some really good ones in here!”
“I’ve got the boxes!” Molly picked up the first book she saw. “Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide, 2nd Edition. Is that good?”
“Only if your’e ready to have the COOLEST GAME NIGHT EVER!” Giovanni saluted her. “Cadet Bear Trap, you might just earn a promotion after this!”
That in mind, Molly suggested, “Hey, now that I can look out the window, I can see the truck. What if we threw all the soft stuff into the truck bed from here so we only have to carry out the heavy stuff?”
“Sitting on a duffle bag of t-shirts does sound better than sitting on the spare tire,” said Crusher.
“YOU-” said Giovanni. “Have just been promoted to Major Bear Trap.”
In the end, they made off with about half the contents of the room, most of Aunt Becky’s yarn and peanut butter, and all of her bath bombs. At last report, she hadn’t even noticed it was gone. Molly wound up going home with a lot of the clothes too small for everyone else, as well as a Lisa Frank backpack’s worth of stuffed animals, duplicate Dungeons and Dragons books, and Chips Ahoy. The eyeless bear, dubbed Igone, she carried home in her arms. Knowing Giovanni had the original copies, Molly gave the books a quick look-over, found most of them boring, and put all the boring ones on eBay. It was a tidy $200 total after shipping, and Uncle Wade was asking for them back next month.