Hop To It - Advance 6

[Tails]

The thing with tracking down a wanderlust-afflicted speed freak with a severe aversion to staying in one place for too long and who could break the sound barrier with what to him was a light jog… was that it was hard. When Sonic decided to go off-grid, it was next to impossible to find him because even when someone did see him, and was able to recognize who that blue blur they saw was, by the time Tails heard about where he was and arrived, Sonic was already gone.

Luckily, Tails had a lot of experience hunting Sonic down. Eventually, he found him on a small, unnamed island, running laps. The island was mostly savannah, and very flat save for the occasional natural loop or corkscrew. Sonic stood out sharply amongst the yellow grass.

How exactly did Sonic get to this island when he was last seen on the Federation mainland, couldn’t swim and couldn’t hold still long enough for a boat ride? Tails had no idea. He had no intention of asking.

The Tornado dove and Tails flipped it upside down as he hovered over Sonic during a long straightaway. When the shadow he was casting covered Sonic, the hedgehog finally looked up.

Sonic grinned at seeing him. “Tails! Buddy, good to see you!” He twisted to run backwards, somehow maintaining his speed.

“Good to see you too!” Tails said, shouting to be heard over the wind. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you!”

“Aww, sorry Tails. What’s wrong? Is Eggman up to no good again already?”

He shook his head. “Not as far as I know. I just wanted to check in on you!”

Sonic’s grin softened. “Heh. C’mon, there’s a spot to land up ahead!”

---

Once Sonic stopped to wait for Tails to land his plane, they shared a small meal Tails brought with him: wieners, roasting on sticks over a fire.

Sonic sniffed, taking in the aroma of cooking meat. “Mmm, thanks little buddy. I’ve been craving a dog lately.” It wasn’t the same without the chili, but it was still pretty good. “So, you checking in with everyone?”

Tails nodded, planting his stick in the ground to keep roasting while he dug the buns out of some hidden compartment. “I’m going around. The last adventure was a doozy, and I want to make sure everyone’s alright.”

“Pfft, is that all?” Sonic winked. “You don’t gotta worry about me. Nothing can keep me down for long!”

“I know.” Tails handed him a hot dog bun. “As for the others, you should know that Gamma is up and active again.”

Sonic stared blankly, then snapped his fingers. “Wait, I know this one. Wasn’t he that big robot who helped out at Station Square? The one who turned against Egghead?”

“Right! I finally finished fixing him shortly before that whole ARK thing, and he booted up afterwards without issue.” Tails poked his hot dog to see if it was ready. “...I still haven’t told him about the copy of him on my computer… or the fact that he’s the copy. I forgot to, when he first woke up, and now I just don’t know how to bring it up.”

Sonic looked at him, serious. “Right, I think I remember you telling me this. The original Gamma couldn’t think without an animal powering him, right?” He tested his sausage, then wrapped the bun around it and pulled it off the stick. “I can’t speak for him, but if it were me in that situation, I’d be okay with it. It’s still him, right? Just another one of him?”

“Something like that…”

“It’ll all work out,” Sonic assured him. He hesitated. “How’s Amy?”

“She’s househunting,” Tails said. “She got tired of roughing it and wants to find a place to stay again. Last I heard from her, she was having trouble finding some place she can afford.” Tails shrugged. “I offered to let her stay in my house in Emerald Town while I’m not using it, but she said it was too embarrassing. I don’t know why.”

Sonic paused mid-bite. “...That’s the house shaped like your head, right?”

“Yes.”

“...Yeah, I dunno why she’d reject that,” Sonic said, smirking. “How’s Knuckles?”

“I don’t know yet. I’m heading to Angel Island after I’m done here.” Tails smiled. “Knowing him, he’s probably the same as he ever is.”

“Guy’s too hardheaded to be anything else,” Sonic agreed.

They both turned to watch a nearby herd of zebras grazing, having approached while they were talking.

Sonic gestured at the plane with his hot dog. “I notice you’ve gone back to the biplane design for the Tornado.”

“Yeah. It’s a classic look.” Tails smiled sheepishly and rubbed the back of his head. “And with the X-shaped wings you can’t really stand on them while it’s flying, and I know that’s your favorite part.”

“Heh.”

“Anyway, after I’m done with Knuckles I’m going back to my Mystic Ruins workshop to see Humi, Iota and Heyu again. Heyu’s probably got a way to contact Rouge, so--”

Sonic blinked. “Wait, who?”

“Rouge? The bat who was working for Eggman, but actually for G.U.N.”

He waved his hands. “No no, I remember Rouge. I meant that other person you mentioned.”

“Iota? I was pretty sure you met him--”

“Not him either.”

Tails gave him a flat look. “I know you’ve met Humi, Sonic. This isn’t funny.”

“I’m not trying to be?”

Tails crossed his arms. “Did you mean Heyu, then? Humi’s dad?”

A split-second-too-long pause, and then: “Oh, Heyu!” Sonic slapped his knee. “I know him, of course I do. I thought you said something else!”

Tails squinted at him, then shrugged. It wasn’t really a surprise that it took him a second to remember. Sonic and Heyu didn’t really interact much. “Well anyway, I plan to stick around that area for a little bit, in case you need to reach me.”

“Good to know.” Sonic sighed. “Man, I wish we could find a cell phone that didn’t fall apart once I started running.”

“Maybe if you got some real pockets--”

“You know how I feel about pants.”

Tails put his hands up placatingly. “I know, I know…”

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

[Humi]

“Oh no, are you sure it’s airtight? What if we spring a leak and drown?!”

Humi ignored the complaint, continuing to work on the engine.

“Drown? We can’t drown. We’re robots, you know.”

“Dunno about that. We don’t breathe but we still shouldn’t get wet.”

“But we’re waterproof!”

“Maybe you two are, but I’m an older model!”

“And you’re not in the best shape either.”

Humi snorted at their by-now typical back and forth. The Omochao were weird, and when they were all together they only got weirder. 

Ono, the scaredy-cat one with no paint, had really fixated on that submarine thing, and truth be told she was interested in building one, but some cursory research into how they were made suggested they were way more complicated than they looked. It wasn’t enough to just make it leak-proof, you also had to make sure it could withstand a lot of pressure! Then you need ballast tanks, which apparently involve taking in or pushing out water to alter the overall buoyancy of the sub to let it sink or rise in the water at will.

It was a fun challenge! And learning more about the technologies involved was really interesting. But it wasn’t something that would work with her usual prototyping process. She couldn’t just slap a bunch of junk together until it worked the way she wanted, she had to take it slow and careful. That part wasn’t so fun. She had too much she wanted to do to go slow, bleh.

So, in the spirit of taking baby steps with regards to watercraft while also making something now, she was building a motorboat. Hopefully it would get the Omochao off her back so she could do something else while the submarine thing cooked a little longer.

Not that it wasn’t fun. She liked boats. She was basing this one on the Y-Nought’s body, since it had been Ono’s hiding spot to begin with.

The boat wasn’t pretty, but it was floating and balanced and it had room for all three little robots to sit. And if something went wrong, they could fly, so it was good enough for a first try. As a final step she popped a chaos drive into the engine to power it, and it immediately started humming.

“Good to go!” she announced, cutting off their argument and slamming the hood shut. “Take her for a spin!”

Dano whooped and dove into the driver’s seat, the other two following behind. Ono took a seat in the back while Yuno rode shotgun.

“You know, I heard once that boats need a name. Sailing a boat without a name is bad luck.”

Dano scoffed. “It’s a motorboat. It doesn’t sail.”

“Well, actually--”

“Wait! What was that about bad luck?!”

“Have fun!” Humi stuck her tongue out as she climbed the stairs up the cliff. “Ciao!”

She took a slow pace back to the house. Humi had a lot on her mind lately. The music video plus Fry and Shelldon showing up had distracted her for a bit, but she’d been thinking about things.

The most fun she ever had building something, when she really thought about it, was rebuilding Iota with Tails. A close second was building the Y-Nought mk.1 out of scattered robot parts and turning the desert into glass with the mighty force of her arsenal. The mk.2 was a better machine that she was really proud of, but taking different pieces and jamming them together into working parts, blowing up robots and then using them to repair her mech while never once laying off the firepower… it was exhilarating. The G.U.N. drones and badniks were very different styles of machinery, so getting them to work together was a blast.

After putting together that Hunter, Humi realized that she just really liked robots, and she wanted to keep building them. And for that reason, she kept thinking about the Final Egg…

She pushed the thought away as she turned into their driveway. Or was it more like their street, now? After a minute she entered the clearing, looking around to see if anything had changed since that morning.

Fry, true to his construction roots, had proved handy with a hammer and nail. He took the train to the city to get more fresh ingredients, and came back with a lot of wood boards. After putting together a pair of picnic tables to sit in front of his truck, he got to work building a lean-to for Shelldon.

Shelldon, for his part, had moved all of his supplies to his claimed spot on their street. With a new roof over his head, he converted his tent into a drinks stall. He was wiping a glass as she approached, looking up when he heard her.

“Hello, Humi! Thirsty?” He smiled at her. He never smiled with his teeth, and she wondered if he even had any.

She squinted at him, hopping onto the single barstool that he just had for some reason. “Depends. What’s today’s experiment?”

The slug brightened. “I’m so glad you asked! I found some wild honey--not near any poisonous flowers, I checked--and decided to try my hand at a non-alcoholic mead. It’s basically a honey-flavored soda.”

Humi tilted her head back and forth, considering. “Okay, I like honey.”

Shelldon beamed and quickly filled a glass with amber liquid. It was thicker than she expected, and Humi took a tentative sip. She nearly gagged. It was the sweetest thing she’d ever tasted and not in a good way.

“Ooh, that’s an interesting face,” Shelldon noted, still smiling. “No good?”

“...I’ve had worse.” Gaia, her teeth ached. “Can you make it less… uh. Actually yeah, can you make it less?”

“Too sweet, huh?” The slug tsk-ed. “Hm, should I water it down some more or… I bet I could add in these bitter roots and balance it out that way…”

He turned away, already preparing to do it over, and didn’t even notice her making her escape back to the house.

She made her way to the bathroom to brush the honey taste out of her mouth. As she went, she passed by Iota carrying a large box into Heyu’s new study that he was putting together. The box was either a desk or a bookshelf, she didn’t stop to look. Humi just rapped her knuckles against Iota’s leg as a greeting and kept moving.

Fry and Shelldon were weird in their own ways, but having them around was nice. She wondered if having neighbors was always like this. The air around the house always smelled like good cooking now. In the city, the scents were more along the lines of smoke, garbage and… other things. On the whole, she preferred this.

After several minutes of scrubbing, her teeth finally felt normal again, and she wandered into the kitchen, intending to get some chips or something, and found Heyu on the phone. Which reminded her, she needed to get back to work on the Y-Mi…

“No, no, it’s not that I don’t like talking to you,” Heyu said, holding the phone between his neck and his shoulder while his hands made a sandwich. “I just--I’ll admit, I’m baffled that I’m apparently important enough to talk to.”

Humi grabbed the stepstool and dragged it over to the cabinet.

“As I’ve told you before, I was just there on the ARK. I didn’t--...Okay, yeah, I’ll admit that that was mostly my idea. I still can’t believe G.U.N. is doing that. I don’t follow politics, is the UF in any danger, with our military going through all that?”

She opened the cabinet and clicked her tongue; the bag was still out of her reach. Heyu turned to look at the sound, saw her, and silently grabbed the bag. Humi reached out to take it, but he didn’t give it to her.

“That’s good to hear.” He winked at her, making Humi pout, and took a small plastic bowl from another cabinet and poured some chips into it, then handed her the bowl. “Oh, and I just remembered, I found the guy. …The guy you asked me to look for, Shelldon? The bartender. Yeah, him. Iota found him on one of his hikes. He was really out of it, but aside from one hiccup seemed to be doing okay. He’s camping out next to our house now.” Heyu frowned. “...What, what’s funny? …Okay…”

Humi took her paltry bowl of not enough potato chips to the table and took a seat while Heyu closed the bag and replaced it. He went back to his sandwich.

“So,” he said, taking a bite and swallowing. “Now that the pleasantries are out of the way, to what do I owe the pleasure of a call from the mayor’s daughter?”

Humi looked up. Heyu’s eyes slid to meet hers. There was a prolonged silence as Ms. Gildenhall spoke.

He covered the phone’s mic. “Hey, Humi. Do you remember those maid robots we saw in Final Egg a few months ago?”

She blinked. “Yeah?”

“Ms. Gildenhall--”

The phone squawked.

“--Fine, Maddie’s housemaid is retiring at the end of the month, and she found out about those robots somehow. Apparently Gamma mentioned you being a genius in his interview.”

Humi took a particularly large chip and crunched, loudly. “Okay?”

“Would you like to build a maid for Maddie in exchange for ten thousand dollars?”

Humi choked. She swallowed roughly, half-chewed chip scraping at her throat, and started coughing. Heyu quickly handed her a glass of water.

Once she could speak again, she grinned widely. “Heck yeah, I do!”

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

Now, obviously, Humi wanted to build the robot herself. Duh. She liked building things after all.

But her experience with programming was still extremely lacking, since she had so few opportunities for it. She didn’t have a computer yet, and didn’t know enough about them to build her own from scratching (not that she had the equipment for that either… she needed a lot of stuff, actually). The most coding she’d done since building Iota with Tails was reworking a robot monkey head to act as her mech’s aiming system.

She didn’t know how to program a maid. And that’s why they were back in Final Egg.

“...the way I see it,” she explained as they approached the room Gamma showed her, “I can find the option for the maid in the assembly line computer, and order it to prepare one of the maid’s brains. Then Iota and me can go inside it and remove anything about loyalty to Eggman or destroying Sonic or whatever.”

Heyu hummed, looking up at the nearest assembly booth as they passed it. “Not a bad idea,” he said. “Though, you could probably just order it to, you know, build the maid outright.

Humi scowled. “But I want to build it myself. That’d be cheating.”

Not to mention it would probably be worse than what she could build herself. Eggman was a better engineer than she was--so far--but she saw firsthand what his style of mass production did to the quality of his robots during the ARK Incident. Those E-1000 robots were supposed to be the follow-up to Gamma, but they were inferior in every way. They were stupid, had bad aim, and were barely any harder to destroy than the average badnik. Humi believed in quality over quantity. One extremely powerful robot could do way more than a hundred merely okay ones.

“...Besides,” she continued, after a moment of silence, “This is the first time someone’s ever paid me to build something for them. I want to give it a personal touch.”

Heyu grinned. “Good answer.”

Humi looked up at the building arms, lying dormant. Then shook her head and sped up.

Iota pointed. “Observation: There it is.”

The goodnik linked up with the door control and ordered it open, and they all stepped into the server room. The console lit up more quickly than last time, apparently still only in sleep mode, and Humi quickly scrolled through the available badnik models.

While she looked, Heyu stepped up to one of the computer towers, frowning. He ran a finger along the top of it and wiped away a layer of dust. “Hm. Robotnik really just abandoned this place, huh?”

Humi’s eyes flicked down the list. Thankfully, the names were accompanied by pictures, which sped her search up considerably.

“Kiki, Ladybuggy--what--Leon, Litebug, Madmole--ooh--Mantis, Masher, Motobug…” Humi blinked, scrolling back up. “Wait, this list is alphabetical. Shouldn’t ‘maid’ be before Mantis?”

“Suggestion: Perhaps you are looking under combat units, and there is a separate list for utility robots?” Iota suggested. He pulled Humi’s chair away from the console and plugged himself in, eyes darkening as his focus turned inward. “...no, there is only one list.”

Heyu scratched his ear. “Maybe he brought the maids over from a previous base.”

“That doesn’t explain, like, three quarters of the badniks here!” Humi complained. “I’ve never even heard of a Ladybuggy! It just looks like a weird Motobug, which by the way we didn’t see any of those in Final Egg the first time either.”

“Heck.” Heyu rubbed his chin, then snapped his fingers. “I know. Didn’t we break a few in that hall leading to where we found Iota?”

Iota jerked.

Humi nodded slowly. “We could probably salvage something from any piles we find…” She made a face. “I need to organize my things better. I wonder if I could put a bunch of labelled cubbies in my pocket…”

It would be really unlucky if she already had a maid robot CPU in her hoard back home and it just got lost in the shuffle.

Heyu shrugged. “No harm in checking.”

They stepped back out of the room into the huge factory floor. Humi climbed up Iota to put something between her and the bottomless pit.

Heyu shielded his eyes with one hand and looked around the room, squinting. “Hm… Most of the floating platforms are gone… but I think… Hm.” He pointed at a door on a catwalk above theirs, then made a gesture. The rings around his wrist that Humi had almost stopped noticing shot out and wrapped around the upper floor’s guardrail before yanking him up onto the grated floor above.

“Good, that still works.” He turned and winked at Humi, who only had a split second to realize what was about to happen before the rings wrapped around her waist and she was pulled directly to Heyu.

She shrieked, and when she stopped moving she found herself clinging to Heyu’s legs like a limpet. She looked up to glare at him. “Why couldn’t you just jump like you usually do?!”

He waved his hand placatingly and picked her up. “I didn’t want to miss over a pit this deep. Here, I got you. Iota, raise your hand!”

The goodnik looked incredulous. “Doubt: I am at least five times your weight. Are you sure I’m the one who will move?”

The hare rolled his eyes. He shot the Sling Ring out and grabbed Iota’s arm. “Jump!”

Iota complied, and the rings added to his height and pulled him over onto the catwalk. The platform shuddered when he landed, but it held.

“...Clever. Doubt: Retracted.”

Humi looked over Heyu’s shoulder and glared at the pit. “We need to fill this in somehow…”

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

Walking through these backroom halls was almost nostalgic… which was a crazy thing to feel about something that happened only four months ago. But it felt like a lifetime. For as much as had changed, it might as well have been as far as Humi was concerned.

They didn’t find any wrecked maid robots, sadly, but they did pass by the server room they wrecked up.

Heyu grinned as they walked by. “Cleanup on aisle three.” Humi giggled.

“Wot?”

“Oh, don’t worry about it. You had to be there.”

At the end of the hall was basically their last hope: Eggman’s lab.

Humi really hoped they found something. If they could start with a maid CPU ready-made, she’d have to do something crazy, like… copy over Iota’s base programming and force the infant AI to watch homecare videos, or something. That was how Iota ended up the way he was. But it felt unreliable; what would she even show it? Maids and their daily routines weren’t likely to be on VHS somewhere, were they? …Maybe Ms. Gildenhall would settle for a butler.

Humi shook her head and pushed open the door into the lab. There were piles of scrap everywhere; last time they didn’t have much chance to gather any.

Iota immediately peeled away from them and went to face an inactive, empty pod. It was much taller than him.

“Wistful: …I knew that this body was smaller than my original self, but I hadn’t really thought about how much shorter I was. Was I taller than Gamma?”

Humi squinted, struggling to remember. “...I don’t… think so?”

“You were basically the same model on the outside,” Heyu offered. “We never saw the two of you side-by-side, so I can’t say with certainty.”

Iota nodded distantly. “Did I ever… apologize for attacking you?”

Both of them blinked, exchanging bewildered look.

“You didn’t--”

“You never--!”

They paused, talking over each other, before Heyu gestured for her to go.

“You never attacked us,” Humi said seriously. “E-108 Iota attacked us. You’re Y-Iota. You’re a totally different person.”

“Couldn’t have said it better.”

“Am I?” Iota asked, picking up a Leon head and studying it. “I have the memory of waking up and assaulting the first blue thing I saw. It isn’t clear, but it is there.”

Heyu scoffed. “Listen, Iota, buddy. E-108 existed for, like, 10 minutes tops, and he wasn’t even finished. Even if you are the same guy, I’d equate it with someone waking up from a, a coma and lashing out in a panic. I wouldn’t blame someone for acting irrational in a state like that.”

“You’ve been our friend a whole lot longer than you were our enemy, and that’s all that matters,” Humi finished firmly.

Iota looked at them, eyes shining brightly. Idly, Humi wondered how to go about making him more expressive.

“Thank you, my friends. It means a lot that you--what the dickens?”

Iota lurched forward towards the opposite wall, where a set of windows looked out over the Egg Viper’s arming chamber.

“I saw something! Did either of you see that?”

They didn’t but they weren’t about to doubt a camera seeing something. Heyu ran for the access door and they stepped down the stairs, looking for whatever Iota saw.

“It was blocked by the blinds or I could tell you what it was. All I know for certain is that it was--blue. Oh.”

Standing in the center of the hangar, in the middle of a big Eggman logo, was the navy blue badnik that they last met in this very spot: E-106 Eta.

The cylindrical robot was slumped over on top of the logo’s left eye, all indicator lights dark.

“Huh,” Heyu said, hands on hips. He looked back at the lab windows, judging angle and distance. “Did you maybe see him from a distance?”

Iota made an audible rewinding noise, apparently for the effect. “Perhaps? Reviewing the footage is inconclusive. My optics were focused on the two of you, and it was in the background and blurry.”

Heyu clicked his tongue. “Well, at any rate, I’m surprised. I would have thought Robotnik took Eta with him when he abandoned this place.”

“Guess not,” said Humi, who hadn’t really thought about Eta again after the Chaos Incident ended. She remembered him now, almost accidentally helping them survive the battle against E-108, and then just letting them use the elevator to leave without a fight. Here he was now, sitting abandoned.

Then a thought occurred.

“Hey… If he never got destroyed, did his animal ever get released?”

The three of them considered the question. Then they considered the fact that Eta was clearly unpowered right now, having been left alone for months.

Humi hurriedly pried Eta’s chest open, shifting things aside until she got to the battery compartment. An opaque, glowing green orb sat in the usual place, and she pulled it out as gently as she could. Behind her, Heyu dug through his pockets for something to eat other than peppermints.

The orb dimmed, turning translucent to reveal a tiny penguin with large eyebrows, eyes closed. After five seconds, the bubble popped and the Mobini fell over.

It snored, and all three of them sagged in relief.

Heyu finally located an unopened pack of jerky, and waved a piece of dried meat under the penguin’s beak. Its eyes fluttered open--and then it tore into the meatstick like it was starving. It probably was. Humi got out a bottle of water for it, then turned back to Eta.

She didn’t have another artificial emerald on her, and Tails’ method for creating them required having a real one on hand, which she also didn’t.

Humi did have a chaos drive, though, and it would work for a little while.

Slotting the temporary battery in and closing him back up, they waited to see if he’d boot up. Slowly, fans started blowing and discs started spinning, and Eta’s red eyes lit up.

He sat a little straighter, lifting off the ground with his repulsor system. He looked them over.

“...What. Is Going. On?”

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

Explaining things to Eta took a few minutes, but eventually they caught him up on events. He was particularly shocked to find out Robotnik nearly destroyed the world; you can’t rule over a pile of rubble after all.

“You are searching. For the maid. Programming?” he finally asked when they finished.

Humi nodded. “Yeah. We tried to get it from the assembly console on level… uh, I think it was F02?” She looked at Iota for confirmation, and he gave her a thumb’s up. “But it wasn’t on the list.”

“Of course. Not,” Eta said in his stilted drone. “While not. Technically. A part of. The E-series. The Egg Maid. Uses many parts. And programming. Originating from. E-100 Alpha.”

Heyu raised a finger. “You mean ZERO?”

“Both names apply.” Eta beeped. “There are five. Assembly consoles. One for each. Quadrant. And one. Master control. Only the latter. Contains the option for. Maids. And other. More complex badniks.”

Humi got a sinking feeling as Heyu asked, “Which one is the master console?”

Eta pointed back at the stairs up to the workshop. “It is the one. Closest to. This lab.”

They stood in silence as they absorbed that.

“That’s the one we destroyed,” Heyu noted, sounding a little strained. He sighed. “Man. That sucks.”

Humi kicked at the ground. “It really sucks…”

Eta beeped again. “I am grateful. For you. Pulling me. Out of standby. I can. Provide. The code. If you desire.”

“Really?” Humi squinted. “Are you really going to help us again, just like that?”

“Humi.” Heyu put a hand on her shoulder, then looked at the badnik. “What about Robotnik?”

Eta’s eyes flashed. “What. About him. He. Is not here.”

Humi snorted.

Eta pointed at Iota, who looked up from where he was feeding the penguin. “E-108. Approach. And I. Will upload. The code. As a text file.”

Iota cringed. “Actually, that isn’t my name anymore.”

“Do tell.”

Eta transferred the data over, finally giving them what they came for. Eta thanked them again, and Humi promised to come back with a more permanent battery and some jailbreaking.

Eta moved to guide them to the elevator again, and Heyu and Iota (and the penguin) moved to follow. Humi hung back.

She was staring at the great big Eggman-face logo on the ground.

…

Humi pulled out a can of spray paint and crudely painted over the logo with pink paint. With a can in each hand, she got it done pretty quick.

“Humi! Where’d you go?!”

“Coming, pops!”

She stowed the cans away again, and turned to go. But she’d come back. She was starting to think up plans.

Behind her, staring up from the floor, a mouse head winked cheekily.