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"Eric?"
Nudge, nudge, nudge.
"Eric?"
Nudge, nudge, nudge, nudge, nudge, nudge.
"Eric? Eric, come on, already!"
Nudge, nudge, nudge, nudge, nudge, nudge, nudge, nudge, nudge, nudge, nudge, nudge, nudge, nudge, nudge, nudge, nudge, nudge, nudge...
Eric violently flipped over, and sent Kass (our faithful nudger) flying off the bed.
"What, is the room burning down?"
"No, but it's time to get up. We have to go to a demo-thing," Kass informed him.
"I thought Straightlace did those."
"Not when she's missing."
Insert pause here.
"Missing?" Eric asked.
"Yeah, missing."
Another pause. Eric was sort of sleepy, OK?
"What about Su'?"
"She at least left a note," Kass responded, stretching to reach the top of the dresser. Grabbing the note, she read: "Eric and Katherine - gone to Tinkerbell meeting, be back later. Susan."
"Oh, well, that explains a lot."
"Now that I think about it, Jack left us a note too." Kass reached up again on the dresser, grabbed the note and read: "Toby Grendel doll is missing. If you see it, let me know."
"Whoopee."
"Anyway," Kass hissed, "you're stuck with us for the entire day. Come on, get dressed, we have to go."
-----
After the demo, Eric was dragging his feet among six creatures and a robot.
"Geez, that was rough."
"It would have helped if you knew anything!"
"Oh, shut up."
Blip flew closer to Eric. "I know you're just learning, but I think everything would have gone about three hundred percent better had you not of stood there looking stupid."
"I wasn't looking *that* stupid, was I?" Eric looked around, to find that he was minus a Blip.
"Over here!"
Poor Blip was sitting on a sewer grate. "I can't hover over these, you have to help me over."
Eric went and picked Blip up. "Really? I thought you could fly over anything."
"Not grates, or anything with holes in it, for that matter. I'm assuming you don't care as to why?"
"Right."
Eric got Blip over the grate, and then dropped him like a hot rock. Blip quickly hovered to avoid a nasty dent. "Over there!" Eric pointed out a small, torn rag on a bush. "What's that?"
The norns (and grendel, and ettin) ran over to the rag. Jenna picked it up and examined it. "Some sort of rag," she decided. "And look, wet footprints." Jenna pointed with her stick to a series of footprints leading away from the rag.
After talking it over for maybe about a second, they decided to follow the prints. It lead them to a familiar sight to *us*, anyway -- Kal. He was sitting on a bench.
"You there!" Eric called. He took the rag from Jenna and held it up. "Did you lose this?"
Kal stared for a minute, stunned. All of a sudden, the norns, grendel, ettin, and Blip ran (hovered?) over to him. There was a lot of laughing and hugging following that, as everyone piled on Kal.
This thoroughly confused Eric. "What on Earth are you guys doing?"
"You don't recognize her?" Lydia asked.
"HER?" Eric gasped. "He looks pretty, uh, he-ish to me."
Karr reached up and yanked off Kal's baseball cap. Longer, dark hair fell out, revealing not Kal but our very own Katherine Riggs.
"Don't be to hard on Slacker," Katherine cooed in a mocking tone. "He can't help it if he can't recognize me as quickly as you can."
"But why are you dressed up like this? And why did you have to leave us?" asked Blip.
Katherine was all to happy to explain. "Remember yesterday when I went to get some water? While I was at the fountains, I saw our old friend Jasper. I wanted to find out what he was doing, and the only way I could completely throw him off our trail while still getting information was to dress like this and get into his hide out. 'Turns out, Jasper doesn't do pattern recognition too well. He's trying the same thing this year, and he's got the Toby grendel doll to tie to the rocket."
The creatures all gasped and said how awful it was and so on, but Eric was silent for a long while. Finally:
"Straightlace, do you have some childhood issues you'd like to discuss?"
"Oh, shut up! Jasper wouldn't have let a girl in his hide out."
"Sure, sure. I assume you like the color purple?"
"Stop that, Slacker!"
"Should I call you Tinky Winky now? *Straight*lace doesn't fit."
It took all the creatures there that day to restrain Katherine, for Eric's own personal safety.