…how an ordinary schoolgirl became an

INTERNET VOYAGER!

Ron the Mopple might have looked a bit scruffy - but he certainly knew what he was doing. He hopped down into the cockpit next to Adrienne, and gave her another one of his big winks.

"Move over in the bed then!" he said. "Let the dog see the rabbit!" Adrienne moved over to the furthest corner of her cockpit and logged onto her orange computer, trying to look very busy in case someone she knew flew by. It was all so embarrassing, she thought!

Wizzie sighed. Dot could see he felt Ron was letting the dog world down a bit, with his scruffy clothes, his baseball cap with the Union Jack on it, and his Cockney way of talking. Ron looked back at him and grinned.

" 'Ow's the old King Charles Spaniel's world then?" he asked, as he pulled the front of Adrienne's computer down - the purple one - and slid underneath it (the actual box with the P.C. in it was under Adrienne's control desk, down at the floor level of her search engine.) "Keepin' our heads are we?"

Wiz growled in an offended kind of a way. "Cheek!" he muttered under his breath. "Anyway I'm a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel!"

"Don't mind 'im dear!" said Deirdre the owl with a kindly look at the little dog. "He will 'ave his jokes, you know! Can't stop him no matter how you try!"

"So - what's the gag?" said Mr Mouse, hopping up on the back of Adrienne's seat to watch what was going on. "What's all this head stuff?"

Dot tried not to laugh, but she knew the answer. "Oh well er, King Charles, who Wiz is named after, had his head cut off in the olden days" she said. She'd just done the Civil War in history. She could even remember the dates. "It was at the end of a big war in England when the King was fighting Parliament and the Parliament won. 1649 to 1660."

"Shame I call it" said Deirdre, unclipping the shiny locks on her strange blue bucket, and wiping round the inside - it was all shiny, with spirals going round and round inside it. "Not the way to treat the Royal Family, that's what I say!"

"So - wait a minute" said Mr Mouse, as Ron disappeared even further under Adrienne's control desk, pulling his pipe and bundles of wires along with him. "You guys killed your own king? You know how many people wanna see your Royals when they come to England? And you offed him - cut his darn head off? Shee!"

"Well, it wasn't quite like that" said Dot. "You see the King thought everyone should do exactly what he told them." She pushed her glasses up on her nose, trying to remember everything Mr Naylor, their history teacher at St Mary's, had told her. "But the MP's were chosen by the ordinary people to come to Parliament and decide how things should be done too. So - "

"So you had two lots of guys trying to run the joint?" said Mr Mouse shaking his head. "No wonder you hadda have a war! Anyway - does this make old Wizzo here a Royal too?"

"In a way" said Wizzie proudly. "It was King Charles who brought my family of spaniels to Britain in the first place you see! But the second King Charles Ron, not the one who had his head cut off."

"Hitched a lift did you?" came Ron's voice from under Adrienne's control desk. Wizzie sniffed. "Right!" the bulldog Mopple went on. "Nearly there now! Hook me up to yer old bucket Dezza!"

"It's not a bucket Ronald" said Deirdre firmly. "It's my Overload Reclamation Facility! An' a nice new one too! First time I've used it, today!"

"Well it's still a Bilge Bucket to me!" said Ron cheerfully, sliding out from under Adrienne's control console and pushing his Union Jack baseball cap round the right way again. "Nah then! Let's be having you!"

Deirdre hopped down into the cockpit and put her 'Overload Reclamation Facility' down next to Ron. She stood back, leaning on her big old-fashioned mop, and watched as he expertly flipped open a flap on the side of the big blue bucket and plugged in the tangle of wires that he'd brought with him. Last to be fitted on was the curly pipe, which Ron screwed down onto the strange funnel shape on the top of the bucket - sorry, Overload Reclamation Facility... let's call it ORF for short!

"Orl right then Frenchy" said Ron. "You can blow out nah!"

Adrienne reached over and - with some difficulty - pressed four keys on her purple keyboard at the same time with her right paw. Then she held down both buttons on her mouse. Mr Mouse winced. "Ouch!" he said. "Just hate it when people do that to me!"

The screen - the purple one in front of her - suddenly flashed bright red. Then a shower of figures in brilliant silver and gold colours started running down it.

"That's the ticket!" said Ron, mopping his face with a bright blue handkerchief.

Just then, the pipe fixed onto the top of Deirdre's bucket - her ORF - started to quiver and shake. A rumbling noise came out of the search engine's control panel, and then it started to shudder too - so much so that Adrienne's mouse and her pen and notepad fell off the desk in front of it onto the floor. The shaking and shuddering was so strong that her other screens, the green and the white ones, went all blurred - you just couldn't read what was on them at all.

"Blimey!" said Ron. "You 'ave got a nasty one 'ere, an' no mistake!"

Now the ORF started to bounce around too - and an even stranger thing happened - the sides started to go transparent, so that you could see what was going on inside.

It didn't look very nice, Dot thought. Whirling round and round were what looked like millions and millions of little leaves - all black and spikey. It was all the data from the ZITS about Munich that Adrienne didn't need (nor did Dot's dad, either), which had got stuck in her computer, jamming it up. There seemed to be an awful lot of it.

Deirdre shook her head and opened another little flap in the side of the ORF, pushing her mop in and turning it round and round so it pushed the whirling "leaves" down. She gave the mop a final shake and pulled it out very quickly. The flap in the ORF snapped shut as she did so.

Deirdre took a close look at the mop head. Then she turned to Adrienne with a worried look on her big brown and black owl's face.

"You're not on an upper search level are you dear?" she asked.

"Mais oui" said Adrienne. "We went for Level 9..."

Ron and Deirdre looked at each other. "Level 9?" said Ron. He was looking worried now too. "Oh dear oh dear! Wish we'd known! Still - too late to do anything about it now!" He gave the ORF a tap as it shuddered away.

"We'll just 'ave to 'ope for the best!"