Golden Cages
Title: Golden Cages
Fandoms: Lost in Space/Gilligan’s Island Crossover
Characters: Will Robinson, The Skipper, Gilligan, Ginger, Doctor Smith, The Robot
Rating: Gen
Orientation: Gen
Word Count: 2,613
Prompt: Caged/Confined
Notes: for Jeannie, because she challenged the muses.
Will blinked up at the hot sun that was beating down through the palm trees overhead. He wasn’t entirely sure how he had ended up alone, on a sandy beach by a lagoon when his last memory was of playing chess against the computer on the Jupiter 2. He pulled his sweater off over his head and tied it around his waist.
There was a trail leading away from the lagoon, something large and heavy had been dragged along the sandy ground. Judging by the shape and depth of the groove, which looked round and about the right size, he figured it to be the The Robot. He followed the trail to a cave and paused outside. There were a lot of footprints in the sand. Hearing voices, he quickly dove behind a large rock beside the trail.
“I’ve told you, we don’t know anything about your missing components! We’re stranded here, we’re not spies!” Will peeped over the rock to see a large white-haired man in a blue polo shirt and white pants being lead into the cave. His hands were cuffed behind his head and he did not look happy at all. The three women following him were all scantily clad and carrying weapons that looked to be laser guns. Will sighed, he had seen those women, or a bunch like them before. They were from Delatoid Seven, they were clones that worked for a scientist bent on galactic domination. Doctor Smith had once tried negotiating with them, but everything had gone terribly wrong and they’d nearly lost the ship.
Will sighed and sat back to think. He was alone, unarmed, and had no idea what planet he was on. The big guy had been speaking English though, which was weird. He spied a sturdy stick on the ground nearby and picked it up. He needed his robot back, if he was going to get home. If the delatoids had a ship, there was a possibility he could steal it. But he couldn’t fly it without the robot’s help. He was only a fair pilot.
He crept into the cave, pausing inside to let his eyes adjust to the dimness of the cave’s interior. He could hear noises, so he went in that direction. He came to a chamber that was lit with an odd blue light from floating electronic lanterns, a familiar sight that he had seen the last time they had run into the delatoids. One wall of the cave was lined with large cages, made of a shiny golden metal, also native to delatoid. To Doctor Smith’s shame, he had found out the hard way that the shiny metal was not gold when he’d been tossed into one of the cages when his dealings went bad.
There were six cages. Four of them were occupied. Will ducked down behind a crate and peeked over. He sighed as he saw that one of the occupants was none other than Doctor Smith. Did he have something to do with them being here? If he did, Dad might just be angry enough at the doctor to carry through on his threat to dump him off at the next inhabited planet for good.
The other people were human. The big guy he’d just seen collected was in one of the cages. There was a woman in the cage on the end of the row, she happened to glance Will’s way and spotted him. Her eyes went wide and she threw herself against the bars of the cage, gripping them tightly and pressing her face between the golden rails as she looked at him beseechingly. She silently mouthed the word, “Help.” Something about her was very familiar, but Will didn’t know what it was. Will wondered why she was wearing a sequined, floor length gown on a desert island? Surely she couldn’t walk in those high heeled shoes in the sand? Women were odd creatures the galaxy over.
How could he help? He peered around, counting the delatoid clones. There were eight of them. He remembered that they were all controlled by a single computer, if he could get to the control panel for it, perhaps he could disable them.
~*~
“You okay, Little Buddy?”
“Yeah Skipper,” Gilligan said, moving over to look at him through the bars. “They aren’t very nice girls. They hit me. And they asked me a bunch of questions I didn’t understand.”
He looked over at the odd women. They all looked the same, at first he had thought they were triplets, but there were eight of them, all with the same faces and hairdos. It was weird. They had kicked and punched him too, demanding to know where their ‘circuit control’ was. He had no idea what they were talking about. Why was it that all these crazy people kept coming to the island? Just once, couldn’t someone normal with a nice boat come and perhaps rescue them? But no, they got the oddballs and nutcases.
Gilligan slumped to the floor of his cage, drawing his knees up and leaning against the bars. His little buddy was miserable. So was Ginger, in a cage on the other side of Gilligan. She was being dramatic, just as she had been when he was brought in, holding onto the cage door as if she were a prisoner in one of her movies.
The Professor, Mary Ann and the Howells were over on the other side of the island, they would be gone for days, collecting food. There was no one to realize the three of them were missing. No one would come and rescue them. Skipper sighed and slid to the cage floor, taking up a position similar to Gilligan’s. He leaned back against the cage bars and watched the weirdo girls.
Two of them were over by what he had taken to be a stove, but realized was a robot of some kind when arms slid out of it and the girls quickly restrained them, wrapping chains around the flexible arms until they were weighted down and immobile.
“You’ll fail at this too!” a high, thin voice shouted from the cage at the far end of the row. Looking through the bars, Skipper could see an older man, clinging to the bars the same way Ginger was doing, shouting at the girls near the robot thing. “You just wait until I get out of here.” Their captors ignored him and carried on with their fetching and carrying and the construction of some kind of machine in the center of the room.
Ginger let out a muffled squeak and he looked over to see her biting her lip and bouncing on her toes as she watched something across the room by the supply crates that the girls kept going back and forth between. He couldn’t see what had Ginger so excited, so he went back to watching the strange man in the other cage.
“Hey!” Gilligan suddenly exclaimed, sitting up and moving to the door of his cage. “Hey!”
“Shh! Gilligan, shh!” Ginger waved her hand impatiently at him. He clamped his mouth back and had the sense to look up at the ceiling when one of the weird girls looked over at him. Now Skipper saw what had caught Ginger’s attention. A teenaged boy was creeping along, weaving in and out of the crates.
Skipper began to whistle and look anywhere but at their possible rescuer. He’d been on the island a long time, anyone was a possible rescuer until they proved to be a nutcase.
“Danger! Danger!” The robot thing suddenly lit up and began to squawk, drawing the attention of every one of the weird look-alike girls.
The boy paused, close enough that Skipper was able to see his shoulders slump as he rolled his eyes. He quickly dropped the stick he had been carrying and darted behind a box, out of sight. Things were apparently not going according to plan.
The bars looked like gold. Skipper had a passing thought that he was a bird in a gilded cage. He touched a fingertip to the bars, running his hand along them, finding them cold to the touch. He was uncomfortable, he would not be able to stretch out in here. Before long, his legs and back would begin to bother him and he’d cramp up. He hoped the strange red-headed kid out there could do something about the situation.
~*~
The delatoids didn’t have a ship. They were converting the cave, which must be lined with minerals they could use, to construct a giant transport chamber. Will had seen them do that before.
He could transport back into the Jupiter 2’s flight path, if he could reset the coordinates. He just needed to get to their computer to make the changes.
The redheaded woman had seen him, but had the sense to be quiet. He stopped short as he realized who she was. She was Ginger Grant, the movie star. Wil had seen plenty of her movies, they were part of the Jupiter 2’s library.
Across the cavern, the Robot’s sensors were active, Will could tell that by the pattern of lights flickering on his control panel. Any moment now, the Robot would pick up on Will’s presence. He hoped his electronic friend didn’t blow his cover. He needed to neutralize the deltoids so that he and Doctor Smith could change the coordinates of the transport.
~*~
“Danger, Will Robinson!” the Robot shouted.
The older man called out, “Oh, hush, you great bucket of bolts. The boy isn’t here. Shush up.”
Skipper hated being confined and helpless like this. It was why he had gone to sea, to be out in the open. Funny how life worked out and you got the opposite of what you wanted. He leaned back against the bars and closed his eyes for a few seconds. He didn’t want to draw attention to the boy by watching to see what he was doing. The weirdo girls weren’t paying attention to him, but that could change.
“I refuse to be your battery!” the man in the end cage called suddenly. “You cannot go around draining people of their life force to run your gadgets. It is highly unethical.” He continued to be ignored by their captors.
“Hey, man, what do you mean?” Gilligan called out. “What are they going to do with us?”
The man sighed heavily and loudly enough for them to hear. “They obviously plan to use us to power their transportation ring. That is what they are building there. They are ruthless, heartless creatures! They will drain us dry, sap our living energy and leave us as dead husks for the crows!”
Skipper did not like the sound of that, not at all. Neither did Ginger. She curled up in the corner of her cage and started to cry in great wracking sobs. In frustration, Skipper hit at the bars and looked over at Gilligan, who gazed back at him with fear in his eyes.
There was an odd clunking sound and then a whirring noise buzzed through the cavern. The odd floating lantern lights flickered and then dimmed. The weird lookalike girls suddenly stopped everything they were doing and became as still as statues. The door to each cage gave a loud click and popped open slightly.
The boy poked his head up from behind a machine on the other side of the room. “I think we have about ten minutes before the system resets!” he called.
“William! Oh, William, you delightful boy! You’ve come to rescue me.” The older man gushed as he flung the door of his cage wide and leapt out.
Will went straight to the robot and began untangling his arms. “Actually, I came to get the Robot,” he remarked with a wry twist of his lips.
Since the kid obviously had some idea of what he was doing, Skipper went in his direction when he stepped out of his cage. “Gilligan, take Ginger and run. Go find the Professor and the others.”
With a nod, Gilligan turned and went to follow orders. Opening Ginger’s cage, Gilligan pulled her up to her feet and led her out of the cavern.
“What can I do to help?” Skipper asked the red-headed teenager.
“We need to get them all into the cages. We’ll use their internal power sources to power the unit. When the device activates, we’ll all be transported away.” The old man said, with a vengeful smirk at the delatoids.
“Doctor Smith, what did you do?” Will asked as he finished freeing the robot.
The man stammered out, “It was a simple transaction, transportation in exchange for a conduit device.”
“Which you do not possess...”
“I had hoped to be away before they realized that.”
“How can you keep doing these things? You are going to get us killed one of these days.” Will looked to Skipper. “I’m sorry you got caught up in this. He gets a little desperate. We’re lost, off track and trying to find our way home. He tends to leap before he looks at any opportunity to go home.”
“I can understand that. My friends and I are stranded here ourselves. What did you do to them?” Skipper asked as he began dragging unconscious females over to the golden cages and placing them inside. “What are they?”
“Delatoids. Clones,” Doctor Smith replied with a disdainful snort. “Inferior creations of an inferior scientist. William interrupted their command feed, disabling them temporarily.” He bent his head over one of the machines and he and the boy began talking in furtive whispers, doing things to the machine as the Skipper dragged the delatoids around and into the cages, sitting them like manikins in the golden prisons.
“Two minutes. This whole cavern is going to transport.” Will said, looking up from the machine at Skipper. “I’ve managed to change the coordinates so that we won’t end up at Delatoid Seven. I can’t promise where we will end up, but you can come along, if you want to get out of this place.”
It was a tempting offer, but Skipper couldn’t leave the others behind. He shook his head, declining. “No, I’ll just step outside, if you don’t mind. Thanks for getting us out of those cages, Will.” He extended his hand and the boy shook it. Smith ignored him as he walked by. Skipper shrugged and gave the Robot a last up and down glance and then left the cavern.
The noise, two minutes later, was deafening.
When the others came back to their compound, arms laden with fruit, vegetables and fish from the freshwater pond on the other side of the island, Skipper was waiting, sitting at the picnic table, munching on a banana.
“You’re okay!” Gilligan exclaimed, rushing to his side and patting his arms. “We went to the cave, but it’s just a big hole now.”
“They left, used the device to transport away,” Skipper told the others.
“No rescue?” Ginger asked, pouting.
He shook his head sadly. “No. Not this time.”
“Will they send help?” Gilligan asked, climbing onto the bench to sit cross-legged beside him.
“I don’t think so, Little Buddy. Turns out, they’re just as lost as us.”
The end Originally posted at http://rinkafic.dreamwidth.org/
Fandoms: Lost in Space/Gilligan’s Island Crossover
Characters: Will Robinson, The Skipper, Gilligan, Ginger, Doctor Smith, The Robot
Rating: Gen
Orientation: Gen
Word Count: 2,613
Prompt: Caged/Confined
Notes: for Jeannie, because she challenged the muses.
Will blinked up at the hot sun that was beating down through the palm trees overhead. He wasn’t entirely sure how he had ended up alone, on a sandy beach by a lagoon when his last memory was of playing chess against the computer on the Jupiter 2. He pulled his sweater off over his head and tied it around his waist.
There was a trail leading away from the lagoon, something large and heavy had been dragged along the sandy ground. Judging by the shape and depth of the groove, which looked round and about the right size, he figured it to be the The Robot. He followed the trail to a cave and paused outside. There were a lot of footprints in the sand. Hearing voices, he quickly dove behind a large rock beside the trail.
“I’ve told you, we don’t know anything about your missing components! We’re stranded here, we’re not spies!” Will peeped over the rock to see a large white-haired man in a blue polo shirt and white pants being lead into the cave. His hands were cuffed behind his head and he did not look happy at all. The three women following him were all scantily clad and carrying weapons that looked to be laser guns. Will sighed, he had seen those women, or a bunch like them before. They were from Delatoid Seven, they were clones that worked for a scientist bent on galactic domination. Doctor Smith had once tried negotiating with them, but everything had gone terribly wrong and they’d nearly lost the ship.
Will sighed and sat back to think. He was alone, unarmed, and had no idea what planet he was on. The big guy had been speaking English though, which was weird. He spied a sturdy stick on the ground nearby and picked it up. He needed his robot back, if he was going to get home. If the delatoids had a ship, there was a possibility he could steal it. But he couldn’t fly it without the robot’s help. He was only a fair pilot.
He crept into the cave, pausing inside to let his eyes adjust to the dimness of the cave’s interior. He could hear noises, so he went in that direction. He came to a chamber that was lit with an odd blue light from floating electronic lanterns, a familiar sight that he had seen the last time they had run into the delatoids. One wall of the cave was lined with large cages, made of a shiny golden metal, also native to delatoid. To Doctor Smith’s shame, he had found out the hard way that the shiny metal was not gold when he’d been tossed into one of the cages when his dealings went bad.
There were six cages. Four of them were occupied. Will ducked down behind a crate and peeked over. He sighed as he saw that one of the occupants was none other than Doctor Smith. Did he have something to do with them being here? If he did, Dad might just be angry enough at the doctor to carry through on his threat to dump him off at the next inhabited planet for good.
The other people were human. The big guy he’d just seen collected was in one of the cages. There was a woman in the cage on the end of the row, she happened to glance Will’s way and spotted him. Her eyes went wide and she threw herself against the bars of the cage, gripping them tightly and pressing her face between the golden rails as she looked at him beseechingly. She silently mouthed the word, “Help.” Something about her was very familiar, but Will didn’t know what it was. Will wondered why she was wearing a sequined, floor length gown on a desert island? Surely she couldn’t walk in those high heeled shoes in the sand? Women were odd creatures the galaxy over.
How could he help? He peered around, counting the delatoid clones. There were eight of them. He remembered that they were all controlled by a single computer, if he could get to the control panel for it, perhaps he could disable them.
~*~
“You okay, Little Buddy?”
“Yeah Skipper,” Gilligan said, moving over to look at him through the bars. “They aren’t very nice girls. They hit me. And they asked me a bunch of questions I didn’t understand.”
He looked over at the odd women. They all looked the same, at first he had thought they were triplets, but there were eight of them, all with the same faces and hairdos. It was weird. They had kicked and punched him too, demanding to know where their ‘circuit control’ was. He had no idea what they were talking about. Why was it that all these crazy people kept coming to the island? Just once, couldn’t someone normal with a nice boat come and perhaps rescue them? But no, they got the oddballs and nutcases.
Gilligan slumped to the floor of his cage, drawing his knees up and leaning against the bars. His little buddy was miserable. So was Ginger, in a cage on the other side of Gilligan. She was being dramatic, just as she had been when he was brought in, holding onto the cage door as if she were a prisoner in one of her movies.
The Professor, Mary Ann and the Howells were over on the other side of the island, they would be gone for days, collecting food. There was no one to realize the three of them were missing. No one would come and rescue them. Skipper sighed and slid to the cage floor, taking up a position similar to Gilligan’s. He leaned back against the cage bars and watched the weirdo girls.
Two of them were over by what he had taken to be a stove, but realized was a robot of some kind when arms slid out of it and the girls quickly restrained them, wrapping chains around the flexible arms until they were weighted down and immobile.
“You’ll fail at this too!” a high, thin voice shouted from the cage at the far end of the row. Looking through the bars, Skipper could see an older man, clinging to the bars the same way Ginger was doing, shouting at the girls near the robot thing. “You just wait until I get out of here.” Their captors ignored him and carried on with their fetching and carrying and the construction of some kind of machine in the center of the room.
Ginger let out a muffled squeak and he looked over to see her biting her lip and bouncing on her toes as she watched something across the room by the supply crates that the girls kept going back and forth between. He couldn’t see what had Ginger so excited, so he went back to watching the strange man in the other cage.
“Hey!” Gilligan suddenly exclaimed, sitting up and moving to the door of his cage. “Hey!”
“Shh! Gilligan, shh!” Ginger waved her hand impatiently at him. He clamped his mouth back and had the sense to look up at the ceiling when one of the weird girls looked over at him. Now Skipper saw what had caught Ginger’s attention. A teenaged boy was creeping along, weaving in and out of the crates.
Skipper began to whistle and look anywhere but at their possible rescuer. He’d been on the island a long time, anyone was a possible rescuer until they proved to be a nutcase.
“Danger! Danger!” The robot thing suddenly lit up and began to squawk, drawing the attention of every one of the weird look-alike girls.
The boy paused, close enough that Skipper was able to see his shoulders slump as he rolled his eyes. He quickly dropped the stick he had been carrying and darted behind a box, out of sight. Things were apparently not going according to plan.
The bars looked like gold. Skipper had a passing thought that he was a bird in a gilded cage. He touched a fingertip to the bars, running his hand along them, finding them cold to the touch. He was uncomfortable, he would not be able to stretch out in here. Before long, his legs and back would begin to bother him and he’d cramp up. He hoped the strange red-headed kid out there could do something about the situation.
~*~
The delatoids didn’t have a ship. They were converting the cave, which must be lined with minerals they could use, to construct a giant transport chamber. Will had seen them do that before.
He could transport back into the Jupiter 2’s flight path, if he could reset the coordinates. He just needed to get to their computer to make the changes.
The redheaded woman had seen him, but had the sense to be quiet. He stopped short as he realized who she was. She was Ginger Grant, the movie star. Wil had seen plenty of her movies, they were part of the Jupiter 2’s library.
Across the cavern, the Robot’s sensors were active, Will could tell that by the pattern of lights flickering on his control panel. Any moment now, the Robot would pick up on Will’s presence. He hoped his electronic friend didn’t blow his cover. He needed to neutralize the deltoids so that he and Doctor Smith could change the coordinates of the transport.
~*~
“Danger, Will Robinson!” the Robot shouted.
The older man called out, “Oh, hush, you great bucket of bolts. The boy isn’t here. Shush up.”
Skipper hated being confined and helpless like this. It was why he had gone to sea, to be out in the open. Funny how life worked out and you got the opposite of what you wanted. He leaned back against the bars and closed his eyes for a few seconds. He didn’t want to draw attention to the boy by watching to see what he was doing. The weirdo girls weren’t paying attention to him, but that could change.
“I refuse to be your battery!” the man in the end cage called suddenly. “You cannot go around draining people of their life force to run your gadgets. It is highly unethical.” He continued to be ignored by their captors.
“Hey, man, what do you mean?” Gilligan called out. “What are they going to do with us?”
The man sighed heavily and loudly enough for them to hear. “They obviously plan to use us to power their transportation ring. That is what they are building there. They are ruthless, heartless creatures! They will drain us dry, sap our living energy and leave us as dead husks for the crows!”
Skipper did not like the sound of that, not at all. Neither did Ginger. She curled up in the corner of her cage and started to cry in great wracking sobs. In frustration, Skipper hit at the bars and looked over at Gilligan, who gazed back at him with fear in his eyes.
There was an odd clunking sound and then a whirring noise buzzed through the cavern. The odd floating lantern lights flickered and then dimmed. The weird lookalike girls suddenly stopped everything they were doing and became as still as statues. The door to each cage gave a loud click and popped open slightly.
The boy poked his head up from behind a machine on the other side of the room. “I think we have about ten minutes before the system resets!” he called.
“William! Oh, William, you delightful boy! You’ve come to rescue me.” The older man gushed as he flung the door of his cage wide and leapt out.
Will went straight to the robot and began untangling his arms. “Actually, I came to get the Robot,” he remarked with a wry twist of his lips.
Since the kid obviously had some idea of what he was doing, Skipper went in his direction when he stepped out of his cage. “Gilligan, take Ginger and run. Go find the Professor and the others.”
With a nod, Gilligan turned and went to follow orders. Opening Ginger’s cage, Gilligan pulled her up to her feet and led her out of the cavern.
“What can I do to help?” Skipper asked the red-headed teenager.
“We need to get them all into the cages. We’ll use their internal power sources to power the unit. When the device activates, we’ll all be transported away.” The old man said, with a vengeful smirk at the delatoids.
“Doctor Smith, what did you do?” Will asked as he finished freeing the robot.
The man stammered out, “It was a simple transaction, transportation in exchange for a conduit device.”
“Which you do not possess...”
“I had hoped to be away before they realized that.”
“How can you keep doing these things? You are going to get us killed one of these days.” Will looked to Skipper. “I’m sorry you got caught up in this. He gets a little desperate. We’re lost, off track and trying to find our way home. He tends to leap before he looks at any opportunity to go home.”
“I can understand that. My friends and I are stranded here ourselves. What did you do to them?” Skipper asked as he began dragging unconscious females over to the golden cages and placing them inside. “What are they?”
“Delatoids. Clones,” Doctor Smith replied with a disdainful snort. “Inferior creations of an inferior scientist. William interrupted their command feed, disabling them temporarily.” He bent his head over one of the machines and he and the boy began talking in furtive whispers, doing things to the machine as the Skipper dragged the delatoids around and into the cages, sitting them like manikins in the golden prisons.
“Two minutes. This whole cavern is going to transport.” Will said, looking up from the machine at Skipper. “I’ve managed to change the coordinates so that we won’t end up at Delatoid Seven. I can’t promise where we will end up, but you can come along, if you want to get out of this place.”
It was a tempting offer, but Skipper couldn’t leave the others behind. He shook his head, declining. “No, I’ll just step outside, if you don’t mind. Thanks for getting us out of those cages, Will.” He extended his hand and the boy shook it. Smith ignored him as he walked by. Skipper shrugged and gave the Robot a last up and down glance and then left the cavern.
The noise, two minutes later, was deafening.
When the others came back to their compound, arms laden with fruit, vegetables and fish from the freshwater pond on the other side of the island, Skipper was waiting, sitting at the picnic table, munching on a banana.
“You’re okay!” Gilligan exclaimed, rushing to his side and patting his arms. “We went to the cave, but it’s just a big hole now.”
“They left, used the device to transport away,” Skipper told the others.
“No rescue?” Ginger asked, pouting.
He shook his head sadly. “No. Not this time.”
“Will they send help?” Gilligan asked, climbing onto the bench to sit cross-legged beside him.
“I don’t think so, Little Buddy. Turns out, they’re just as lost as us.”
The end Originally posted at http://rinkafic.dreamwidth.org/