Sludgia Read online

  Lemonfizz Media

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  Elwood, Victoria 3184

  www.lemonfizzmedia.com

  Scholastic Australia Pty Limited

  PO Box 579

  Gosford, NSW 2250

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  Part of the Scholastic Group

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  Published by Pop & Fizz and Scholastic Australia in 2010.

  Pop & Fizz is a partnership between Paddlepop Press and Lemonfizz Media.

  www.paddlepoppress.com

  Text, design and illustrations copyright© Lemonfizz Media 2010.

  Cover illustration by Melanie Matthews.

  Internal illustrations by Lionel Portier, Melanie Matthews, Steve Karp and James Hart.

  A CIP record for this title is available from the National Library of Australia

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, storage in an information retrieval system, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher, unless specifically permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 as amended.

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  It is our policy, in association with McPherson’s Printing Group, to use papers that are renewable and made efficiently from wood grown in sustainable forests, so as to minimise the environmental footprint.

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  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Back Cover Material

  Long ago beast and man shared one world. Then battles began between them.

  After many battles the world was split in two. Beasts were given Beastium. Man was given Earth.

  A border-wall was made. It closed the two worlds off.

  Border Guards were trained to defend the borderwall.

  The beasts tried to get through the border-wall many times. The Border Guards had to stop them. Battles won by beasts made them stronger. Battles won by guards earned them new battle gear. And they got new upgrades. Then their battle gear could do more.

  Five boys now defend the border-wall. They are in training to become Border Masters. Just like their dads.

  Their dads were also Border Guards once. Then they became Border Captains and then Border Knights. They kept learning until they became Border Masters. Now they make up the Bordaria Master Command. The BMC.

  The BMC helped the Border Guards during battle. They gave the Border Guards new battle gear.

  The boys had to earn new battle gear. They needed to learn from their battles. And from their mistakes.

  Kai Masters is a Border Guard. His work is top secret. The BMC watch Kai closely. Kai must not fail.

  The beasts of Beastium lived in four lands. There was a fire land. There was a rock land and a water land. And there was an air land.

  But over time, the edges of the lands mixed. That was how the border-lands were made.

  The edges of fire and rock mixed. It made a volcano land. The edges of rock and water mixed. There was a mud border-land.

  The edges of water and wind mixed. There was an ice border-land. The edges of wind and fire mixed. That made a storm border-land.

  But it was not just the edges of the worlds that mixed.

  The beasts from each of the worlds mixed too. And then a new kind of beast was made...

  The border-land beast.

  Kai Masters must think about his old battles. He must learn from them. If he does not, then he will fail.

  Kai must not lose.

  It was Sunday morning. Kai Masters was at the dog park. He was playing with his dog. But Kai’s dog was not just any dog. It was a dogbot. And Kai was not just any 12-year-old kid. He was a Border Guard.

  It was Kai’s job to guard the border-wall. He had to stop beasts from breaking through it. Kai had to keep the beasts in their own lands. And his dogbot, BC3, helped him.

  BC could move fast. And he could talk. But only when Kai turned on his chat button.

  BC loved going to the dog park. When he went there he wore his fake fur. It made him look just like other dogs. And no one could tell he was a dogbot.

  Kai threw the ball for BC. BC ran after it. BC picked up the ball. Then he heard

  Mud splats were hitting the ground.

  Strange, thought BC. And he ran back to Kai.

  ‘Where’s the ball?’ asked Kai. BC barked. Then he ran off again.

  He wants me to go with him, thought Kai. He was about to go after BC when he heard

  Mud had fallen onto a boy’s head. Where did that come from? thought Kai.

  Suddenly there was mud falling down on everyone.

  Nearly everyone had mud in their hair. They ran for cover. Kai looked up. The mud was falling from the sky. But how? thought Kai.

  BC came back with the ball. He had mud in his fake fur.

  ‘Yuck!’ said Kai. Then he saw BC’s tail. It was wagging. BC always wagged his tail when things weren’t good.

  ‘You’re right, BC,’ said Kai. ‘This has to be coming from a beast.’

  Kai took out his orbix. The BMC gave one to all their Border Guards.

  It was a small computer. The BMC used them to talk with their guards.

  Sometimes Kai used his orb to store things. Things that he wanted to learn about. And Kai wanted to learn about this mud.

  Kai keyed in

  A metal hand shot out from the orb.

  It grabbed the mud on BC’s fur. Then it went back inside the orb.

  Kai turned BC’s chat button on. ‘We need to test this mud,’ said Kai.

  ‘Yes,’ said BC. ‘In the lab at home.’

  Kai lived in a lighthouse. There were rooms above the ground. And there were rooms under the ground.

  The rooms under the ground were secret Border Guard rooms. And it was there that Kai learned about beasts. And about Beastium.

  Kai and BC went into the kitchen pantry. Kai felt under the bottom shelf. He found a button and pressed it.

  The back wall of the pantry began to move. Behind the wall was a ladder. Kai and BC went down the ladder into the lab.

  The lab was filled with computers and tools.

  Kai put the mud into the sample tester.

  The computer screen flashed.

  ‘The water land and the rock land,’ said Kai. Then the screen flashed once more.

  ‘Sludgia,’ said Kai.

  ‘The border-land between the rock and water lands. That’s a very muddy land.’

  Kai hit the Sludgia button.

  A card popped up on the screen.

  ‘This beast looks cross,’ said Kai. ‘Come on, BC. It’s time for us to go get dirty.’

  Behind the lab was another secret room. It was the battle chamber. All the battle gear was kept there.

  ‘Can I open the battle chamber?’ asked BC.

  ‘Yes,’ said Kai.

  The BMC had given BC a Border Guard Buddy Card.

  The card was a prize. BC had done good work in battle. BC’s card was just like Kai’s Border Guard Card. And it let them into the battle chamber.

&
nbsp; BC pushed his card into the computer slot with his paw. Some bricks in the lab wall began to move.

  They made a space like a small door. Kai and BC stepped though the space.

  There were three walls in the battle chamber.

  Kai had used a lot of things on wall one. He looked at wall three. Kai went to take something. He heard a noise.

  Then a computer voice said

  ‘When?’ asked BC.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Kai. ‘But look at that thing on wall two. That’s what we need.’

  ‘This will dry out mud,’ said Kai. ‘I wonder if we can have something else?’

  The computer voice said

  Kai and BC climbed the ladder to the slide. They slid down into the next chamber. There was a computer on the wall. Kai used it to make his transport.

  ‘Time to build our ride, BC,’ said Kai. He pressed the start button on the BG Build-a-Ride.

  ‘We will be on the ground in a mud land,’ said Kai. He hit the land button.

  Then he hit the mud button.

  Then he hit the digger.

  ‘It will be good for mud battle,’ said BC.

  ‘I hope so,’ said Kai.

  Part of the floor behind them began to move. It was in the middle of the room.

  The bit of floor slid open. It left a big hole. Up from the hole came the sludger. The one that Kai had just made.

  ‘It’s just right,’ said Kai. And he and BC jumped inside.

  Kai took out his orb. He put it into the orb-shaped space in the dashboard.

  ‘We will need to win battle points,’ said BC.

  ‘Yes,’ said Kai. ‘Then we can change it to a bot. This bot mode screen will tell us when.’

  Kai pushed the button. The lift began to move. It took Kai and BC to the top of the lighthouse. The lift doors opened.

  The sludger was on the take-off pad.

  Kai keyed in the codes for Sludgia on his orb. Then he hit the light button.

  The roof of the lighthouse opened. The take-off pad filled with light. The light shot up into the sky.

  It took Kai, BC and the sludger with it. To the border-land of Sludgia.

  The sludger landed in a pool of mud.

  Kai looked around. They were on the top of a hill. There was liquid mud everywhere. It was running down over rocks.

  Mud flowed like a lake along the ground. It spilled over cliffs like falls of water.

  ‘Lucky we have these big wheels,’ said Kai. ‘They won’t get stuck in the mud.’ But Kai was wrong. The sludger had landed hard in the mud. It had sunk deep into it. And it was stuck.

  ‘We’re not moving,’ said BC.

  ‘I know,’ said Kai. ‘The mud is too thick.’ Kai hit the turbo-tyres button on the dashboard. The wheels suddenly grew bigger.

  The sludger rose up out of the mud. Then Kai drove it down the hill.

  ‘We won points for that!’ said BC. ‘Look at the bars.’

  Kai looked at the dashboard and smiled.

  At the bottom of the hill was a sea of mud. ‘It’s not deep,’ said Kai. ‘We can push it out of the way.’

  Kai set the sludger to pusher. The digger tray flipped over.

  They drove into the sea of mud. The pusher pushed the mud out of the way.

  ‘Good,’ said Kai. ‘We’ll be able to change to bot mode soon. But where is the beast?’

  All at once, mud flew up into the air. Kai stopped and looked. The mud shot up from the ground.

  Kai moved around the mud. The pusher hit something hard.

  ‘It’s a big rock in the mud,’ said Kai.

  But BC’s tail was wagging. The rock began to move. It was not a rock. It was a mud hippo. The mud hippo spun its tail fast.

  Mud balls flew from its tail. Mud, mud and more mud. It went everywhere. Kai couldn’t see where he was going. Before he knew it, he had hit another one. The rock moved. It was a mud hippo too. A tail shot up and began to spin.

  ‘We need to get out of here, BC,’ said Kai. ‘Without waking up more mud hippos!’

  ‘But we can’t see,’ said BC. ‘Mud is all over sludger.’

  ‘We have a body-heat finder,’ said Kai. ‘It’s in the computer.’ Kai turned the finder on. The dashboard screen looked like a computer game.

  All the mud hippos were on the screen.

  A dotted line showed Kai how to go between the mud hippos.

  Kai began driving. He drove slowly through the hippos.

  Kai and BC didn’t wake up any more of them. ‘Phew,’ said Kai. ‘That was tricky.’

  ‘But now bars are full,’ said BC. ‘We can change from sludger to bot.’

  All of a sudden the sea of mud moved faster. Faster and faster it went. And as it moved, it took rocks with it. They look like rock-land rocks, thought Kai.

  Mud and rock moved together. Mud flew and rocks rolled. It was hard to see. And then there was a huge noise.

  A beast stood in front of Kai and BC. It was a huge pile of mud and rock. And the beast pulled more mud and rock into it. As it did it grew bigger and bigger. It growled.

  Kai knew that growl.

  It sounds like the rock beast from the rock land, he thought. He took a photo with the orb.

  ‘This is a big beast,’ said Kai. ‘It’s not the beast in the lab. It’s changed.’ Then the beast turned on Kai.

  Huge mud balls flew into the air. They hit the sludger hard.

  The sludger rolled. Kai put the sludger back up on its wheels again.

  ‘Are you alright, BC?’

  ‘Alright,’ said BC. ‘But beast is doing more mud-sling attacks!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kai. ‘We have to stop it.’

  ‘I’ll use the Maxi-heat blaster,’ said Kai. ‘You use the heat bursts.’

  Kai opened the cockpit. BC grabbed the box of heat bursts. He threw a heat burst at the beast. It hit it in the neck. There was a big noise.

  The heat burst popped open. Heat burst out of the beast like there was a fire.

  The heat dried out the mud on the beast’s neck. ck. There was just rock left.

  BC threw more heat bursts. Kai used ed the heat blaster. Together, they dried up all the beast’s mud.

  There was nothing left of it but a pile of rocks. ‘Go us!’ said Kai.

  Kai drove the sludger up to the pile of rocks. Then he used the digger to pick up the rocks.

  ‘Let’s throw these rocks into the rock land,’ said Kai. And he started driving away from the mud.

  Suddenly BC’s tail wagged. ‘Watch out!’ said BC. But it was too late. Kai had hit another mud hippo.

  This time the mud hippo’s tail didn’t spin. It came out of the mud. It scooped up the pile of rocks in the digger. And it took them down into the mud with it.

  ‘This won’t be good,’ said Kai.

  The mud bubbled. There was a strange sucking sound.

  A beast rose from the mud.

  ‘It’s changed again,’ said Kai.

  ‘Maybe time for us to change too?’ said BC. ‘Change to bot.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Kai and he hit the button to change. Then he took a photo with his orb. A card popped up on the screen.

  The bot was sinking fast. Mud had almost covered the cockpit. Kai pushed the turbo-tyres. The bot rose up. But then it stopped. It was still up to its chest in mud.

  ‘We have to use heat,’ said Kai. ‘Quick! We have to dry up the mud.’

  BC threw heat bursts. Kai used the Maxi-heat blaster.

  ‘It’s working,’ said BC. ‘The mud is turning to dirt.’

  ‘Now we can climb out,’ said Kai.

  ‘We need to climb that cliff again, BC,’ said Kai. ‘I know what to do with this beast. Start barking, BC.’

  BC barked. The beast turned and
looked.

  The bot began to climb the rocks.

  Kai heard a growl.

  The beast was very mad. It chased them up the cliff.

  The bot made it to the top. Kai changed the bot back to sludger mode. He drove the sludger into a small cave. And waited.

  The beast stood on the top of the cliff. It looked for Kai and BC.

  ‘We have to be quick, BC,’ said Kai. ‘You work the pusher-tray. I’ll drive.’