cracked when he said, "Are you sure?"

Baloo chuckled jovially and tousled the boy's hair. "Couldn't be surer."

Straightening his baseball cap, Kit suggested, "Glance in your side-view mirror."

"How come?"

"Just do it."

"You know that glass was shot out by Karny and his gang yesterday and Wildcat hasn't had a chance to fix it yet. "

"Okay, um, try this." Kit picked a spoon up off the floor and held it towards the pilot's seat.

Baloo took the spoon.

"See anything...unusual?" Kit prompted.

He got his answer when the Sea Duck began to plummet.

"Baloo, pull up! Pull up!" the boy yelled. His stomach sank as fast as the plane as he watched a forest rush up to meet them.

Yanking back on the stick reflexively, Baloo repeated, "I don't believe this! I don't believe this!"

"You can say that again," Kit said, panting a little from their near-miss. Looking out the window, he could see that there were a few leaves and branches dangling from the starboard pontoon.

"I don't believe this!" Baloo looked at his hands, but couldn't see them. "I'm...solid gone!"

"What could have happened?"

"Don't know. I was fine until I drank that root beer."

"The root beer!" pilot and navigator exclaimed simultaneously. They both then said, "Excuse me," when they collided into each other on the way back to the cargo hold.

Kit got a weird sensation in the pit of his stomach, as when the plane had suddenly dropped, when he saw a bottle of root beer rise up out of one of the crates and float in midair.

"Tasted like ordinary root beer to me."

"With a new secret ingredient," Kit pointed out.

"I can't be invisible," Baloo wailed. "Think of my image."

"Your image is going to be the least of your worries," Kit said, directing his speech towards the floating root beer bottle. "Think of what Miz Cunningham is going to say."

"Oh, man..."

Higher for Hire

When the Sea Duck gently bumped against the dock, Kit asked the question that had been on his mind for hours, "How are we gonna tell Miz Cunningham that her pilot is invisible?"

"Who says we hafta tell her?" Baloo said slyly.

"I think she's going to notice sooner or later, Baloo," the boy retorted. Sometimes he couldn't believe how naive this world-traveling pilot could be. He was only twelve, but it was obvious to him that they couldn't hide Baloo's invisibility from their boss.

"Let it be later, then. We'll hurry up and get this cargo unloaded, then I'm gonna get in some grade-A goofin' off without Miz Manager spyin' on me."

Knowing that he couldn't win this argument, Kit shrugged. "I'll go get the dolly." He ran up the dock into Higher for Hire's warehouse. Casting a glance through the open door connecting the warehouse and office, he could see Rebecca diligently digging through the filing cabinets with her back towards him.

He also noticed that the dolly was leaning against her desk instead of being in the warehouse where it belonged.

Why is nothing easy ever simple? Kit thought as he tiptoed crossed the office, grabbed the dolly's handle, and headed back towards the warehouse with the dolly squeaking behind him.

Just when Kit thought that he had avoided being stuck in the crossfire between Baloo's crazy schemes and Rebecca's scoldings, the file cabinet drawer slammed shut. The boy winced as if he had been shot. Busted! He went to race outside when...

"Oh, good, Kit, you're back," Rebecca said, placing a couple of files on her desk. "Where's Baloo? I need to talk to him."

"Haven't seen him, Miz Cunningham," Kit replied, truthfully enough. He glanced guiltily through the open warehouse door towards the Sea Duck.

"What do you mean, you haven't seen him? He just came back from Hounsland with you, right?"

"Sort of..." He nervously twisted his hands around the dolly's handle.

Rebecca's eyes narrowed in suspicion. "What do you mean, 'sort of'?"

Kit squirmed a little. Baloo was his best friend; therefore he wanted to stick up for him, even when he was doing something wrong. However, there was something in his boss's steady gaze that made him tell the truth.

Dropping his eyes, he stammered, "Um...you see, Miz Cunningham... Actually, you can't see. Jeepers. How should I explain this? Come here." He led her to the warehouse door where they could see a stack of four crates apparently floating themselves up the dock, toward the building.

When Rebecca was able to pick her jaw up off the floor, she exclaimed, "What is that?"

"Baloo. I guess you could say he's, um, invisible."

"WHAT?"

Rebecca and Kit watched as the crates magically drifted past them into the warehouse.

"Here we go," Kit muttered under his breath as Rebecca stormed over to the crates and grabbed Baloo's earlobe with unerring accuracy.

"Yeowch! Becky, what are ya doin'?" the big bear cried, nearly dropping the cargo.

"I could ask you the same thing," she gave his ear a savage pinch before releasing it. "How dare you be invisible?"

Putting the crates down, he said, "Trust me, this just happened."

Rebecca had the urge to give her pilot a satisfying kick in the rear. Out of all of the stunts that he had pulled to get out of working, this was the most outrageous. "Weather 'just happens'. The sun coming up in the morning 'just happens'. Invisibility doesn't 'just happen'!"

Kit interjected, "It does if you drink root beer."

"Root beer?" Rebecca exclaimed, becoming increasingly frustrated. "You expect me to swallow that story?" She made a move as if to strangle Baloo. However, he stepped aside just in time to avoid her attack, thus causing her to trip over the dolly and sprawl onto the floor.

"No story, boss lady," Baloo said, assisting her to her feet. "The root beer we picked up from Hounsland was laced with somethin'. One sip and I was sight unseen."

Kit nodded. "It's true."

"In that case, you saved Higher for Hire's reputation, not to mention a lot of people, by not delivering a dangerous product, Baloo," Rebecca said thoughtfully. Her anger abated as she dusted herself off. "But that still doesn't explain who would put an invisibility formula in root beer? And why?"

Wulff's Wunderbar Factory
The Really Black Forest, Hounsland

In a tiny, yet tidy lab full of bubbling beakers and chemical bottles, a German shepherd with a brown goatee, who looked suspiciously like the truck driver, bent over a lab bench. He was carefully adding a drop of a yellow liquid into a beaker of clear liquid. When the two chemicals combined, the beaker's contents sizzled and turned red, as red as the red on his Swatzi signet ring.

He gently swirled the beaker. "Only one more ingredient and another batch will be ready for those root beer swilling Uslandians. Und while they're dealing with their little invisibility problem, we Swatzis will take over the world!"

"Were your morning errands successful, Dr. Howlitz?" asked a young, portly German shepherd as he entered the lab.

Dr. Howlitz's immediately assumed a benign expression. He addressed his employer as if he were a favorite nephew. "Yes, Hansel. They were successful."

Hansel crossed the lab and picked up the beaker containing the red liquid. Pushing his wire-rimmed glasses up on his nose, he asked, "Is this for the next batch of root beer? It doesn't look quite right somehow."

"Don't touch that!" Dr. Howlitz barked, snatching the beaker from him. "I mean, it tastes terrible. Added too much sassafras by mistake. Bitter. Very bitter."

"You'll dispose of it, I hope. Father wouldn't like if we changed his root beer formula, and I wouldn't want to disappoint him, even now." Hansel glanced at a portrait above the door where an older version of himself beamed jovially down at him.

The young man then pulled an apple strudel out of his pocket and nervously bit into it, causing crumbs to litter the floor. "And when Father was alive, he never thought the factory needed guards or fences or..."

"Tch! You worry too much, my boy," Dr. Howlitz said soothingly. "These are uncertain times. Those things are merely a precaution to ensure that Wulff's will provide the same unparalleled products." He smiled sinisterly at the beaker in his hand. "Unparalleled indeed..."

Khan Towers
Cape Suzette

In the elevator on the way up to Shere Khan's penthouse office, Owen took a bottle of antacid out of his pocket, unscrewed the cap, and took a swig, grimacing at the chalky taste. The position of right-hand man to the wealthiest man in the world paid extremely well, but was giving him an ulcer. And his ulcer always bothered him more whenever he had to relay bad news to his boss.

When the elevator door opened, Owen took a deep breath before hurrying across the immense office towards the immense tiger behind the immense mahogany desk. "The soft drink reviews have just come in, sir."

Khan leisurely folded his newspaper and laid it neatly across his desk before saying one simple command: "Proceed."

"The good news is that in a nationwide taste test, your cola was preferred over all the other leading brands."

"And the bad news?"

Owen's tail twitched as he said tremulously, "But nine out of ten people still preferred Wulff's Wunderbar root beer."

Without a word, Khan's face darkened and his claws shot out and raked new gouges across the deeply scarred surface of his desk.

Feebly attempting to placate his employer, Owen mentioned,

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