This children's/youth sci-fi fantasy is a return to modern day Ohmie. The story follows Ohmie gaining super powers after he and Jimmy Buffett defeated the Eullalas who had attempted to harvest all of the earth’s electromagnetism. Lectric Lad and his team whipped the Elaptarians most recently. Now come the Klðb-ȯns right in the middle of the Chocolate War. (Klðb-ȯns is pronounced clob-ons.)

Jimmy Buffett was trying to reach the Lectrum Force on behalf of the President of America.

Sqwarziland lay between oil rich, and volatile nations of Uris, Bratzo, Chulvera, and the Green Sea. The Green Sea was no one’s ally, but everyone’s algae, being green with the unharvestable stuff.

Sqwarziland was in the fierce throes of a war, begun as a civil uprising against a long-since deposed tyrant, but overtaken by Uris and Chulvera, each intent upon annexing the battered territory. Bratzo was dragged into the melee by the collateral injury to its citizens who worked or visited Sqwarziland in relief efforts, as well as those killed by wayward munitions. The warfare was on the verge of spreading to the surrounding nations as people sided with one faction or another.

At risk was the world’s supply of ÿbrebefrantine, the irreplaceable ingredient necessary to chocolate production. Without ÿbrebefrantine, cocoa beans would never make M & M’s, or chocolate kisses, or chocolate ice cream. The warfare had halted ÿbrebefrantine mining, and the world’s supply was down to six days’ worth. Nations globally were threatening to go to war for those dwindling reserves.

It was a task for the Lectrum Force, led by the world famous Lectric Lad.

Unfortunately, peacemaking was much more difficult than battle. In the goal of preventing carnage and mayhem, stopping one side merely left that side more vulnerable to the opposition’s attacks. Face-saving retribution would nullify any peacekeeping efforts. The Lectrum Force’s super powers, effective enough against steel weaponry, was futile on people strangling one another with their bare hands.

After having magnetized the weapons to impotence and fusing cases of ammunition into blocks of metal where single bullets could not be pried loose, their efforts were reduced to low-tech zip-tying combatants’ wrists to fifty-mile-long dog chains.  Even travelling at the speed of light, success appeared doubtful with determined fighters willing to gnaw off one hand and attempt to strangle the enemies single-handedly.

The Lectrum Force was fully and exhaustively engaged for days, without sustenance or refreshment, when they heard Jimmy Buffett’s emergency signal. The President of the United States loaned him Air Force One because the emergency was so great, so threatening. Jimmy had to fly half way around the world because even though the Lectrum Force could have heard his beacon call after bouncing from satellites, and rebounding off repeating towers, the weakened signal was whisper faint. The tumult and chaos of a Swarziland war had drowned out Jimmy’s last try.

Then, the Earth was attacked, and at the most inopportune moment in time. Klðb-ȯns had invaded earth from somewhere in space. Individual Klðb-ȯns stood eight feet tall with a circumference of about eight feet when raised erect. Like giant fire hydrants. Ordinarily though, they more resembled Volkswagon Beetles, the old 1950’s through seventies models. No one could talk to them, or stop them from blobbing people up.

The Klðb-ȯns’ bodies were like Gummy Bears, only just slightly more liquid, and not nearly as tasty. Alone, they could devour a strong man, and dissolve him in the absorption. They took no prisoners of war, not interested in abducting anyone. Dozens of Klðb-ȯns could meld, presenting a force that could overwhelm an army tank, then re-divide to its individual members.

Bullets had no effect. Neither did any other weapon the police or military tried. Fire made them a little runnier, but that only sped their attacking movements. The President of the United States called Jimmy Buffett for Lectrum Force help since Jimmy was the only signaller of the force. The future of America, and the entire world, was at stake.

At the speed of light, Lectric Lad and Sparkletta transitted to Fowler, Arkansas, where the Klðb-ȯns’ commander seemed to be headquartered. Of course, the invaders were non-metallic and impervious to electricity or magnetism. There was no kind of cage that the two Lectrums could devise that would contain them. Lectric Lad and Sparkletta zoomed to Buzz and Flash, other team members, leaving Swarziland and chocolate lovers to fend for themselves in the face of this new, more critical threat.

The full Lectrum Force had no better fortune than Lectric Lad and Sparkletta by themselves. The Klðb-ȯns by then had strongholds in all forty-eight continental states. The Canadian and Mexican borders meant nothing to them. It was now a planetary war. And earth’s future looked grim.

Short on strategies, the Lectrum Force began collecting the five-hundred-pound individuals, who didn’t move all that fast, having no legs or feet, and piling them on top of one another. The Lectrum Force discovered that by joining hands after surrounding a Klðb-ȯns, they could make an electric platform, enabling them to pick up the Klðb-ȯns and deposit it wherever they desired. First into a lake, then a cave, then an abandoned quarry. Nothing worked to contain them. Putting them into a heap at least slowed the mass to a creeping crawl. Within a short while, they had an entire county’s worth, at least seven thousand, mounded several hundred feet high. The problem was that wherever the mountain of gelatinous Klðb-ȯns meandered, what it left behind was flattened rubble.

“What if we transport their leaders over to Swarziland?” Lectric Lad asked. “At least we can stop the war while we try to figure out what to do.”

The President of the United States was impressed with the plan, excited enough to send his Secret Service agents out for enough Subway sandwiches to buck up the entire troop of Lectrum Forces even though there were only four members.

But the Lectrum Force was tiring. They’d been battling one enemy or another for days on end. Straight through, non-stop, without an adequate break. On their first approach, carrying a Klðb-ȯns on the electrical platform, they missed their target, over-shooting the landing by enough to bounce the Klðb-ȯns down a cliffside and into the viscous Green Sea. When the Lectrum Force returned with the second Klðb-ȯns, the first Klðb-ȯns had not yet emerged from the sea. The same with the next several Klðb-ȯns. None of them made it out of the sea. Flash dove into the murky algae water to search. The Klðb-ȯns were not to be seen anywhere.

Buzz experimented with a bucket of Green Sea water.

Plop, plop, fizz, fizz. The algae acted on the Klðb-ȯns the same way as hydrogen peroxide poured over a cut on a kid’s dirty finger -- it fizzed and foamed. But where the antiseptic left the kid’s boo-boo germ free, the Klðb-ȯns dissolved altogether, within a moment.

Buzz and Flash, charged with excitement over the breakthrough, obtained a gigantic plastic pipe and connected it to a hurricane caliber submersible pump that he installed at the bottom of the Green Sea. The pipe ran across the country, skirted the frozen mountains, crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and all the way to America where Lectric Lad and Sparkletta had organized bucket and water pistol brigades. The Green Sea was being sprayed all over the United States. A massive extermination project.

Where brigades were slow to penetrate, the Lectrum Force transported Klðb-ȯns to the Green Sea for dumping at the rate of about one per second. All was proceeding well until Lectric Lad noticed that the suddenly shadowed countryside was not due to cloud cover, but a huge interstellactic spaceship, presumably filled with even more Klðb-ȯns. The Force’s efforts began to look like squirting so much water on a forest fire.

The spaceship was able to maintain its position over the Lectrum Force wherever they went since it also moved at the speed of light. It dropped closer and closer to the Lectrum Force with each plop of a Klðb-ȯns into the Green Sea.

“What if we split up?” Buzz asked.

“We get blobbed one at a time,” Flash answered.

The bottom of the spaceship began to open, revealing thousands, tens of thousands of Klðb-ȯns ready to drop onto the Lectrum Force.

“Quick!” Lectric Lad yelled. “To the middle of the sea!”

Only inches from the water’s surface and a millisecond from being blobbed, the Lectrum Force dove into the slime pit of the Green Sea. Down they dove as Klðb-ȯns continued to belch from the spaceship, oblivious of their fate, but threatening the Lectrum Force nonetheless with their sheer mass. With less than a centimeter to spare, Lectic Lad, Sparletta, Flash, and Buzz scattered in four different directions, barely escaping the foamy brine and the rocky sea bottom. They re-assembled a moment later in Jimmy Buffett’s backyard where he carefully hosed them of the remnants of the Green Sea, by now renamed the Kobon Sea, the Swarzilanders alphabet containing no ‘ell’.

“I’m tired,” Lectric Lad said to his sleeping friends.

*Oh, and before leaving Swarziland, the Lectrum Force surrounded the territory that was still rife with straggling Klðb-ȯns with the miles of dog-chained Swarzilanders. On some of the sections, one side had the squirt guns while their Swarzilanders enemies held the buckets. The roles were reversed on other sections of chained together fighters with the other side holding the buckets of Green Sea water ammunition. By the time the last Klðb-ȯns was rid from the country, the factions were again friends, as they had been for thousands of years, agreeing to raise the price of ÿbrebefrantine to their western liberators, making chocolate more expensive, but gobbled up by chocolate eaters, nonetheless.

** ÿbrebefrantine  – absolutely necessary ingredient of the nature of myllebdomalonium