Orbeez mysteriously floods the school, clogging the water supply and threatening the safety of students and staff alike.
- Literal dolphin Animorpher Delphi almost drowns in the indoor pool, and has to be rescued by Kay and Sybil to go to the medical ward. The pool closes for OSHA violations.
- Way past uncool Kate almost chokes to death on a glass of Orbeez in the middle of the night. She wakes up to wash out her mouth with boba tea, but almost chokes on Orbeez again, believing them to be “popping pearl boba” served by Artemis and Brown at the Lodge. Kate goes to the medical ward to get her stomach pumped, and the Lodge closes for OSHA violations.
- Dorm 4 is vacated after being infested with Orbeez and violating OSHA regulations, relocating Fraise to dorm with Brown, and Hugo to dorm with Nathaniel.
- Ernst’s bathroom explodes with Orbeez. Something something OSHA.
- Fraise attempts to cook, but his sink is filled to the brim with Orbeez. OSHA.
- Vending machines and drinking fountains are contaminated with Orbeez, meaning water has to be outsourced, costing ERA tens of thousands of dollars in repairs. You get the idea.
Charlie immediately mobilizes his squad and takes upon the duty of cleaning up as much of the Orbeez as possible, calling in a favor from Dr. Ernst in doing so. Claude joins his aide, having just come back from a long tour outside ERA grounds.
Meanwhile, Gyssabel, grounded from the action by her guard(ian)s because of her constant mischief, prolonged absences and troublemaking, seeks the help of SOL (Clyde, Lily, and Bob) to join in the fun anyways. She takes Clyde to the off campus lake, surprisingly uncontaminated by Orbeez, to convince him to package and sell his own brand of water to students, while she takes the remainder of the lake water for a secret mission with Lily and Bob. Clyde excitedly agrees to this deal.
Charlie, Claude, and Ernst go down into ERA’s main underground sewer line, following the path to where the Orbeez have been concentrated in the most. At the same time, Gyssabel and Lily independently traverse a separate sewer line, following the path with the most Orbeez to locate the source, and hopefully the culprit. Ultimately, they hear each other in the dark, and grow paranoid that the other party could be the culprits. Once they cross paths, it instantly escalates into a panic-induced brawl.
Charlie’s prosthetic leg gets bitten off by Lily, using her digestion ability. Ernst’s modified laser pack for destroying Orbeez also gets chewed off. Charlie uses the water from the Orbeez to blast steam at and locate Lily, and Claude manages to subdue her. Before they make the arrest, however, Bob comes with the lake water and flushes everyone out, causing a huge hole to erupt into the outdoor gardens. Before tensions escalate further, Gyssabel intervenes to explain the misunderstanding to both sides. SOL escapes while she gets “super grounded” by Charlie (sent to jail)
Not long after, Charlie gets put on leave by Administration, who deem him unfit to lead his team and unable to work until he gets a new leg, yet don’t supply him with any resources or means of doing so. Jett comes for his blessing to take over the case on his behalf, and although Charlie does not have the authoritative power to reject the offer, he strictly warns her not to get over her own head, but she doesn’t listen and instead takes advantage of his situation. A distrustful Charlie calls his colleagues to watch over her, and then calls in an old friend to help build a new leg.
Jett recruits Oliver and Nathaniel to her case, believing each of them to be valuable assets in garnering information from students. She assumes command of the unit, despite Oliver having to guide her to nearly every executive decision she makes. Outside of his watch (also due in part to Charlie’s micromanagement from afar), Jett winds herself up in random tangents and dead ends throughout the case, such as blowing up a water fountain with Nova to destroy some Orbeez, or playing on a Sega Genesis with Vincent, the mechanics/ engineering professor. Brazilian edgelord twins Enzo and Valentina De Silva make their debuts on campus. Their first order of business is to make everyone else’s lives just that much more miserable, purely for their express enjoyment. Literally bound by their shared Electi ability, they bully Hugo at a vending machine for the last water bottle and Valentina later picks on some loser that’s roommates with Clyde and Bob.
- Trust me, this loser is about to become VERY important.
Also constantly winding up into trouble is Nathaniel, who on one occasion picks a fight with a still-crippled, jobless Charlie at the gym after getting his ego bruised from light banter, only to fracture his knuckles without even landing a punch on him nor getting hit at all. He isn’t arrested because Charlie felt the state he left him in was already punishment enough, nor does he know that Jett involved him in a guard case. Nathaniel takes some time to reflect on his actions, thinking back to his fight with Kay.
Charlie’s old friend Ethan, an engineer and self-made CEO of his startup bionics company, arrives at ERA to find the resources for a new leg. He meets Big Arm, Ernst, Vincent, Goldman, and his nurse Melanie on a quest to build a better prosthetic for Charlie in time to solve the case.
Lily and Bob throw themselves into the holding cells to spend a few nights with Gyssabel to comfort her, leaving Clyde to conduct his water business alone.
Clyde sets up shop for his water bottle business in the main halls, and takes on a new lackey/ex-House goon named Preston for this endeavor, but is soon met with direct competition, in a snide business major naming himself “Poseidon.” Their short-tempered personalities pit them against each other in no time. Nathaniel happens on the scene and takes the opportunity to apply for a job under Poseidon, to see where he gets his water from.
Poseidon takes Nathaniel to an abandoned warehouse, where he reveals his secret bottle production factory. Nathaniel sees carts of Orbeez on the factory lines, and reports his photo evidence to Oliver after narrowly escaping the facility from Poseidon.
Oliver and Nathaniel present the evidence to Jett, who hastily organizes a raid on the warehouse. However, Jett fails to plan accordingly, and the operation goes wrong. Upon arrival, Poseidon makes a run for it, prompting a chase. Nathaniel tries shooting him down with his ability, and Jett stops to scold him. Oliver, using his acid ability to dissolve some warehouse equipment onto the exit path, barely manages to apprehend the suspect on his own. They make the arrest, and Jett believes the case is closed.
Charlie visits Gyssabel in the holding cells, where the witch admits in more or less words and subtextual insults that all of her troublemaking especially as of recent came as a result of wanting to prove her worth and attention to her adoptive dads, who have been too busy with work to pay attention to her. Charlie, especially, is at fault for this neglect and apologizes (in more or less words), recalling similar feelings of neglect he faced as a kid. He doesn’t let her out because he has no power to, though tells her he’s confident she can break herself out.
Skyber shows up the following night to break her out of jail, only to find Gyssabel has already escaped from the cell, and now it’s Skyber who needs help getting out of the facility undetected. Joan notices their escape and pulls some strings to attract the attention of other guard patrols away from the attempt. They succeed, and an impressed Skyber assigns her an investigation on a student named Ridley.
-As it turned out, the whole time the guards were focusing on Poseidon, Skyber was networking in silence. Her biggest lead starts with Splats and Artemis, who befriended a socially inept introvert named Ridley at The Lodge (coffee shop at the shopping district). -Ridley claims he’s in the middle of a falling out with his dorm mates, Bob and Clyde, and temporarily needs a place to stay. Splats offers him her bed in Dorm 1, but he gets freaked about the situation and sleeps on her floor instead. The girls in dorm 1 (Carrie, Splats, and Kay) suspect SOL may be behind the Orbeez floods to turn a profit on bottled water, catching poor Ridley in their crossfire. -Splats mass texts her friends that night for information about SOL. Skyber informs Splats that Clyde’s last name, Kittenger, is actually an alias for Clyde House, and suspects him to be the grandson of her mortal enemy Cain House from the 70s, the late godfather of a powerful mafia called The House. In other words, Clyde could have totally done it. Probably.
Back to the present, Gyssabel literally drags Brown out of bed from his depression nap to help her with her investigation, thinking he can talk some information out of a distracted Ridley while she sneaks around and searches his room. Brown is invited in on the pretense that he’s Splats’ “ex”, hates Clyde, has heard of Ridley’s troubles, and is here to help give advice out of experience. Brown inquires about living with Bob and Clyde, and Ridley rants about their constant harassment and stealing of his things, yet laments his utter incapability to do anything about it, out of fear of what they might do to him. Brown gets angry at this “pathetic” reason and a heated argument breaks out over how to handle the situation. Just before Brown gets kicked out, Gyssabel finds “a single, pristine Orbee” hidden in a backpack underneath Ridley’s bed, and takes it back to Skyber’s casino as evidence.
Back at the Four Scaled Clover, Gyssabel and Brown report their findings to Skyber. Gyssabel hands in her photo evidence and Brown suspects a motive, thinking that it wasn’t SOL who caused the incident, but rather Ridley, who’d been so fed up with them he seemed willing to do anything to drive them out. Artemis, brand new to the casino, thinks he might have a replication ability, and could be using that one good Orbee to secretly mass produce tons of poorer quality ones.
At the casino, Gyssabel calls Charlie with her new phone (to everyone’s horror) and asks if the guards are on the same track. Charlie says otherwise, and Oliver’s reports tell him they arrested Poseidon instead, though nobody but Jett believes he did it. She schedules a meeting with him to share her own findings and hangs up. Artemis reveals that Poseidon is her simp coworker, really named Kevin Elbaz, who is too weak-willed to mastermind anything this big.
Ethan finally finishes Charlie’s new prosthetic leg and leaves ERA to attend to his business. Charlie is caught up on everything by Oliver, who reports Jett’s accomplishments and mishaps. He decides to test the leg by going straight back to work, while Jett is in the middle of interrogating Poseidon. She has no luck, considering her methods of dealing with the case up to the arrest were unlawful at best, and he leverages this to his advantage. Charlie intervenes, and makes him admit that he had nothing to do with the incident, but instead collected as many Orbeez as he could using his moisture extraction ability to build a water bottle monopoly and profit off of everyone else’s misfortune. He remains detained on that charge, but is implied to be released offscreen scot-free with “really good lawyers”. Charlie proceeds to chew Jett a new one for endangering her team and herself. Jett regretfully listens but doesn’t really learn, more focused that Charlie had a partner before but no longer believes in the buddy system. Jett now really wants to be Charlie’s new buddy cop.
Soon after, they follow an anonymous tip to the Lodge, regarding the true culprit behind the Orbeez. There, they run into Skyber, who’s also received similar news. Brown and Ridley appear across the cafe, only for Brown to be an illusion cast by none other than Gyssabel, the one orchestrating the whole meeting. She has each party exchange information, from the false lead to the prison break to the dorm room interrogation. That’s when she presents the damning piece of evidence: the Pristine Orbee, the original one used to copy over and over again with a multiplication ability. Ridley gets the point, and confesses his crime. He reveals that he had copied Orbeez for the past six months as a stress relief from being roommates with Clyde and Bob; he never intended to cause all the damage and was too scared to confess, rightfully believing ERA wouldn’t care for his plights like they had done all this time, but would certainly take someone they weren’t as scared of and punish him far worse. The detectives take pity on him and relocate Ridley into a pseudo-house arrest at the guard barracks to be watched over and occasionally put to community service, finally closing the Orbeez case.
While Gyssabel had finally earned the respect of the guards and completed her biggest job as a witch ever, her entire arc-long plan backfires realizing Ridley is now her new roommate, who’s about to get a LOT more attention than her.