"What in the world are you doing?"

"I think there's a puzzle piece this way."

"The guide says the last puzzle piece is in Mumbo's hut!"

"What does the guide know?"

"Everything?"

"Nuh-uh!"

These were the sounds of Friday afternoon at Katherine's house, which consisted of a healthy fight over Banjo-Kazooie. (Which is a video game.) Susan was at the controls, and she firmly believed that exploration and guesses were the way to get puzzle pieces (Which was the goal of the game) but Katherine swore by the technique of reading the guide book and following the instructions, or at LEAST getting a map of the level.

"See?" Susan pointed out, as she switched to Kazooie (A small red bird living in Banjo the Bear's backpack) and ran up a hill. "If I just get past this crab I find..." Susan then dropped her controller.

"Diddily." Katherine reminded. Then she started pointing to her guide book. "If you had turned at the ship, then you could've.."

"Forget this. Let's play a different level." Susan sourly replied, and shinnied out of the world. As she made Banjo run around the main playing area, she thought for a moment. "Ever notice how Kazooie gets very little or no respect?"

Katherine glanced up from her guide book. "Nope."

"Really," Susan rambled, "sidekicks in general never get any main mention at all. Look at all the stuff Kazooie does, and most of the characters refer to BANJO when they speak! Think about it-In the movie Aladdin, Abu was there for comic relief. Dilbert gets more funny lines than Wally, I never hear ANYTHING about Posh Spice, and Barney-related products are always PURPLE instead of green, like Baby Bop!"

"I have no idea what you're talking about." Katherine stated.

Susan nodded. "It figures.."

Just then, a little norn-size scream let loose from Katherine's laptop, which was sitting on her bed.

"Ah-ha! I KNEW you abused your norns!" Susan pointed accusingly toward Katherine.

"Oh whoopee. Asking them to learn all their verbs before childhood is SUCH a crime. But really, why did that norn scream?" Katherine added before flipping up the monitor and trying to see what was happening. As she woke the computer, she was greeted by the little "Welcome to Creatures 2" dialog box that insisted she either needed to install, run, or quit. She closed it out, and switched too C2. Karr was standing in the incubator elevator shaft, trying to push the button to make the lift come back down. The escalating lift harbored Lydia and a grendel, the latter beating the snot out of the former. Another grendel snuck up behind Karr, and gave him a punch that knocked him clear into the submarine dock. As he was trying to regain balance, the grendel came back, dragged him into the lift and took him up to the desert.

"What-in-the..." Katherine started as she tried to move the hand. "The hand's frozen!"

"Try typing something." Susan suggested, dropping her controller and coming over to peek over Katherine's shoulder. Katherine tried pressing a few keys before pronouncing that stuck, too.

"Maybe I can restart." Katherine thought aloud, managing to get her pointer to the start menu. She clicked the little icon, then selected "Shut Down", then "Restart".

The computer then beeped at her (It's a known fact that Windows loves to beep at people because it secretly hates the whole human race and is planning to take it over and enslave all humans in coal mines.) and gave her a dialog box that said: "Windows cannot shut down because Error 345456E54 occurred." (Translation: "Windows secretly hates you. Pay Bill Gates even more money to continue.") Katherine then said a few words that would cause me to loose my AOL account if I repeated here, and then pressed Ctrl-Alt-Del.

"Hey.." Susan began, watching Katherine scroll through the ridiculously long list of extensions trying to find Creatures 2, "It's not listed."

"What's going on here?!" Katherine asked rather loudly. "It's like Windows secretly hates the whole human race and is planning to take it over and enslave all humans in coal mines!"

"Or Creatures is running on its own power." Susan corrected. "Whatever works."

Katherine sat back and thought for a minute. "The only way I can think of to fix this is to manually go through the HoloDeck, export myself, and force Creatures to quit from the resulting crash. I'd be on the hard drive, safe, and you could restart the computer from there, reimport me, and we'd be done with it."

"Or we can always call Tech Support." Suggested Susan.

Katherine cringed. "I'll get the HoloDeck ready."

And that's what she did, and after a whole mess of hooking and testing, she finally squatted on the 'deck (It was made mainly for norns, so Katherine never thought to make it human size.) and pressed the appropriate button, sending her to the far side of the incubator room. She gave herself a good brushing off, and took a good look around. And let me tell you-the incubator room looks very, very butt-kicking when you're actually there. The running water trickled at an incredible rate into a full pond that was a sky blue. The sand that made up the caves was a golden yellow, and sparkled like diamonds in the glowing rays of light trickling down from the desert. An incubator sat a few feet away, waiting for someone to place an egg in it so it could help create new life. "Maybe I'll look around just a bit.." Katherine thought to herself as she took a step toward the lift. She kept walking until she stepped in a patch of tomatoes, at which time she decided to just sit down and have a snack. Picking up a tomato, she broke it in half and bit part of the juicy pulp into a piece she could easily fit into her mouth. Feeling her hunger drive sink, she sat back for a moment. There was no real rush to export herself, she could find the scripts later. Closing her eyes, she laid down for a momentary nap.

If you know anything about norn naps, you know that they last exactly one-tenth of a second. And Katherine was no exception. "Blip?" she muttered as she blinked a couple times and opened her eyes. "Blip? Where are-" Stopping short, she realized Blip wasn't there. The fact was slightly depressing, but she (pretended to) shake the thoughts of loneliness away. Even though it felt like she had been sleeping forever when she woke up, she scared herself quite a bit, thinking about Susan sitting on earth being extremely mad. But before she could stand up and begin to manually activate the scripts to export herself, she felt something grab her from behind.

"I thought we GOT all the norns in this area!" a harsh voice screeched behind her. It was obviously a grendel.

"What in the-Let go of me, naven!" Katherine screamed, wiggling hard to free herself of its grasp.

"Naven?" The grendel asked as he dragged her toward the elevator shaft and pressed the call button. "That's a new one." The lift came chugging down the shaft, and the grendel forced Katherine into it before climbing in and pressing the up button.

"We found another!" The grendel called as the lift finished taking him to the treehouse. He pushed Katherine off the treehouse, and she landed hard in the sand.

"They just keep popping up!" Another grendel hollered up to the first, as he drug a shocked and hurt Katherine to the cactus patch. Shackles were put around her arms, and she was connected to a whole chain of norns. As Katherine lay in pain and befuddled, she heard familiar voices.

"Hey.. I think I remember her."

"Are you sure? I've never seen a norn like that before. I didn't think she ever bred her purple mountains with foxes."

"That's not really a norn, that's Katherine herself!"

"Say again?"

"I remember when she had to inject herself into Albia to escape from the asylum authorities.. she looked just like that when she was a norn."

"You know your memory's not what it used to be..."

"Oh quit that! I know when I remember something!" Katherine then felt a paw placed on her back. "Are you all right?"

Katherine opened her eyes very slowly. As you might of guessed, Kass and Jenna were standing over her, members of the same chain. "Wha- why-Why are the grendels doing this?" she muttered.

"Who knows?" Kass replied. "They just started capturing norns and then doing who knows what to them. And it looks like we're next.."

"They've got everyone." Jenna added. "Karr and Lydia are a little further up the chain. Look, maybe you need to just rest."

Katherine quietly closed her eyes, and tried to sleep.

--------------------

Blip floated into Katherine's room. A quick look around provided enough evidence that Katherine, however, was gone. "Where did Katherine go?" he asked.

"Into Albia.." Susan answered quickly.

Blip shook himself. "What in the-Why did she do that?"

"Creatures went offline; we can't get it to respond and we can't shut down the computer, so she figures she can export herself and cause a crash, and then that'll enable me to shut down the computer."

"And where is she now?"

Susan scrolled around a bit, until she found Katherine. "It looks like she's been beaten by grendels and is trying to sleep the pain away."

"WHAT?!" Blip shouted, shocked. "Alright, I'm OK.. anyway, maybe you should go in and help her. She can show you where the export scripts are, or you can just use the HoloDeck.. I can shut down the computer from here if you'll connect me. The cable's behind the bed."

Susan nodded. "You're right." She then crawled over the bed and dug out Blip's cable, connected him, and crawled over and squatted on the HoloDeck. "Wait-a-minute.. if you two allegedly don't care for each other, why does this concern you so?"

Blip winced for a moment. "Just go!" He begged.

"All right! Going!" Susan pushed the appropriate buttons, and was teleported into Albia. However, she wasn't concerned with detail like Katherine was, she was concerned with getting Katherine out of the mess she was in. She ran toward the lift, and pressed the up button.

"Hey!" The grendel that had captured Katherine called. "One of those norns is coming up the lifts now!"

The lift that Susan was in chugged up to the treehouse, and stopped with a ding. "Get down there with the rest of them!" The grendel shouted, giving Susan a good smack.

"Why?" Susan shouted, hitting him hard on the arm.

The grendel stood for a moment, stunned. No norn had ever done this too him before! "Because, you worthless chit, I SAID SO!" He then gave Susan a hard punch in the stomach, and, while she was bent over, kicked her off the edge into the cactus patch.

Katherine perked her head up at this. Looking around, she saw a norn who had fallen in the patch of cacti. "Who in the world?"

"Katherine," Susan whimpered, "it's me.. Susan.."

Katherine ran (Best she could) over to Susan. "My gosh, what in the world did they do to you?"

Susan didn't answer. But she did manage to whisper, "Susan intensely hurt" before she closed her eyes for the last time, let out a soft whimper and died.

"SUSAN!" Katherine shouted, shaking her hard. But she felt the pull of the chain, and was yanked away before she could properly say good-bye.