CHAPTER TWELVE: FOCUS, HIERONYMOUS! A NEW AND DEADLY PROBLEM AWAITS! 
--

When we last left our hero, Hieronymous Smith, he was about to be kicked
in the nuts by a very, very old man standing on top of a pole. He had a
refrigerator strapped to his back, was teetering above the ground on a
set of very, very long bamboo poles, and had a sneaking suspicion that he
was about to die.

He could tell that he was about to die by the fact that his life was
flashing before his eyes. Most of it was very boring; far too much of it
involved listening to his father, Incomprehensible Smith, lecture on such
topics as "two rights don't make a left turn signal" and "the duck stops
here." Another chunk of it involved listening to his grandfather,
Irascibility Smith, attempting to instill upon him the importance of
drinking and chasing women.

At one point he thought he saw a circle of very, very old men dressed in
rugged, sensible Nordic Fleece and Gore-Tex standing over his crib. Their
leader's face was obscured by the hood on his Nordic Fleece parka, but
Hieronymous could tell that he was old by his wizened, gnarled hands and
the giant walking stick that he held in his right hand. They were all, to
a man, wearing hiking boots.

In his mind's eye, as the old men in Nordic Fleece and Gore-Tex chanted
over young Hieronymous's crib, their leader held aloft a giant, glowing
ball of luminescant energy in the hand that was not occupied by his
walking stick. He then tried to shove the ball of energy up the one year
old Hieronymous's nostril; when it wouldn't fit, he resorted to hitting it
with his giant walking stick while the other old men clustered around,
cheering him on and making impractical suggestions.

Suddenly his attention was drawn back to reality, where a foot was about
to kick him where it would really, really hurt. As he waited for the
inevitable impact ...

... the world ground to a halt.

Hieronymous stared at the scene, baffled. There was Wilf's foot, hanging
in space, and moving towards him at a snail's pace. Suddenly annoyed, he
leapt up in the air, flying with ridiculous speed over top of the
still-frozen Wilf's head. He landed nimbly on one leg atop the pole behind
the old man, and with his other leg, he snapped out at Wilf's kidneys.

Then the world sped up.

Wilf's kick met only air. The old man's eyes bulged out of his eyesockets
in surprise, then bulged out even further as Hieronymous's toes connected
with his floating ribs. With a loud cry of "Whauuuugh!", Wilf fell off the
poles.

"Oh sod," thought Hieronymous, "I didn't mean for THAT to happen." He
looked down to try and figure out how to help, and more importantly what
the hell had happened, only to see Wilf hanging by one arm from the plum
blossom pole.

There were small holes in the treated, pressurized bamboo where he had
gouged holes in it with his fingertips. His fingers and arm bulged with
muscles as he hung there, grinning at Hieronymous as though he hadn't a
care in the world.

"Well done!" exclaimed Wilf exuberantly. "Hah! Well done indeed! That'll
show 'em!" He wrapped his legs around the plum blossom pole and slowly
slid to the ground. "You can get off the pole now," he added, "and you can
also take that bloody fridge off."

Hieronymous successfully clambered down off the tall pole to where Wilf
was waiting on the ground below. He took th fridge off, and suddenly felt
every single muscle in his body collapse. Hieronymous crashed to the
ground like a tower made out of Jell-O cubes.

"Ah," muttered Wilf, "that was to be expected."

Hieronymous couldn't feel his legs or his arms. All he could feel was a
rather unpleasant burning sensation that had spread all along his body.

"What the hell is going on?" he tried to say, but all that came out was
"Whuh hehh blw."

"You see, lad," Wilf said knowingly, "when you did that little
time-stopping trick of yours to get out of my trap, all that you really
did was slow down your own perception of time. As far as I was concerned,
you just blurred out of existance, appeared behind me, and kicked me in
the kidneys. It's a great trick, and a good way to get out of a tight jam,
but it does have its hidden costs - as you can now see. Oh ah."

"Howzat?" mumbled Hieronymous.

"The human body is designed to operate under certain conditions," Wilf
continued. He opened Hieronymous's fridge and removed a bottle of Mrs.
Vulpenia's All-American, Original Formula Da Dit Jow and proceeded to
slather his pupil's leg and arm muscles in the foul-smelling liniment. It
burned and stung as he worked it in, with Wilf's unusually strong finger
muscles busy restoring life to Hieronymous's taxed body. "When you exceed
those conditions, bad things happen. In your case, you leapt about seven
feet in the air with a fridge strapped to your back, and if that's not
overtaxing yourself I don't know what is. So you're going to hurt for a
little while. Oh ah."

The old man's expression suddenly turned serious. "Be very careful with
this, Hieronymous," he intoned, his face stern and his eyebrows pointing
towards his nose like a pair of white, diametrically opposed windshield
wipers. "If you overexert yourself too much, you can snap your muscles in
half. You can break your bones. Worst yet, you can exceed your maximum
heart rate. If you do that, cardiac arrest will soon follow and you will
die. Be very, very careful."

With that, his face lit up in a smile and his eyebrows fluttered up and
down enthusiastically. He hauled Hieronymous up to his feet, and draping
the teenager over his shoulders with no apparent effort at all, he slowly
started to manhandle him back through the forest.

"I'm still proud of you, though," he noted. "You have something now that
you can always fall back on if you need to. But use it only when you need
to."

"Like when I'm protecting precious people?" mumbled a confused
Hieronymous, who was about to black out.

Wilf thought about this very carefully. "No," he replied slowly. "I would
suggest that you only use this technique when you need to kick serious,
serious ass. Or possibly to impress women. That's a good reason. Oh ah."

--

The drive back to the house was uneventful. Hieronymous dozed off; his
dreams were restless, and involved being a stuntman on a Jackie Chan
movie. A large German wrestler named Rudolf would hit him over the head
with a two-by-four, and they kept having to re-shoot the scene because he
kept flubbing his lines. Every so often the old men in the Nordic Fleece
would show up and try to shove more glowing balls of energy up his
orifices.

Wilf drove in silence. His thoughts were his own, and only his own.

When they arrived at the house, they were greeted by Mrs. Maple and Louis.
Louis stared at the mess that was Hieronymous Smith and simply shrugged it
off; Mrs. Maple, on the other hand, decided to hit Wilf over the head with
a frying pan.

"You wicked, wicked man!" she exclaimed.

"But Maggie," replied a cringing Wilf, "I had to. You know I had to. And
anyways, aren't you always going on about how your Sifu used to drop
boulders on your head to toughen you up?"

"That's different," retorted the elderly martial arts champion. "He's just
a boy."

"And you were six."

"And you were my Sifu."

Wilf considered this. "Oh, ah..."

"Whatever," snapped Mrs. Maple. "I'll deal with your unorthodox 'training
methods' later - for now, help me get him inside. We'll need to prop him
up against something - he's in for a nasty shock."

"Oh yoicks, what now?" muttered Wilf as they manhandled Hieronymous's
inert form into the House's living room. The two old people deposited him
in a large plush recliner, which he sank into with visible appreciation.

"You'll need coffee," muttered Mrs. Maple as she scurried off into the
kitchen.

"And whiskey!" Wilf yelled at her departing form. He sat down gingerly in
a wicker chair, feeling the effects of his own day out. "I'm getting too
old for this sort of thing," he mumbled to nobody in particular as he
closed his eyes and started to doze off.

The sleeping duo were awakened when Mrs. Maple returned bearing two cups
of coffee, a bottle filled with amber liquid, and a large letter in a
fancy envelope with a wax seal. She poured a healthy slug of the amber
liquid into both cups and passed them around.

"This arrived for you while you were out," she noted, and handed the
letter to Hieronymous. With that she sat down on a conveniently located
couch, grabbed the bottle of alcohol, and refused to let go of it despite
Wilf's finest entreaties.

Hieronymous stared at the letter in shock, and had to take a slug of his
coffee-laced whiskey before he could calm down sufficiently to open it.
Inside was a small, gilt-edged invitation card.

"Oh no," said Hieronymous, his face pale.

"What is it, lad?" asked Wilf.

Hieronymous took another slug of coffee. "It's an invitation to the Smith
family reunion."

"The what?" asked Wilf. "What's so bad about a family reunion?"

Hieronymous eyeballed Wilf mercilessly. "Have you ever been to a Smith
family reunion?" asked Hieronymous. "More to the point, have I ever been
to a Smith family reunion?" This caught him by surprise. "No," he
concluded, "I haven't. But I know what it'll be like."

"When is it?" Wilf asked. Hieronymous studied the gilt-edged card
carefully. The invitation was written in the shakiest handwriting that he
had seen in his life - it made even Wilf's illegible scrawl look like
calligraphy by comparison.

"Saturday, two weeks from now."

"My, aren't you busy," said Wilf. "Your challenge is on Sunday."

"Don't think I've forgotten," replied Hieronymous. "I have all these
lovely bruises and welts and things to remind me."

"Such an active social calendar you've got," Mrs. Maple noted. She topped
up everybody's coffee, and took another healthy slug from the bottle of
booze for good measure. "Once upon a time, I was a young debutante too,"
she slurred, and passed out on the sofa.