I had managed to glue my paws together with fish paste and pine sap when Tigger came bursting through his trap door. A moment later, Leo appeared from his. To most people it would sound like they were talking over each other, but you just had to adjust your hearing and hold your head at an angle to make out what they were saying. "We gotta do something…" Leo began.

"…we ain't ever done…" Tig continued.

"…before. We have to make…"

"…pizza before it's…"

"…too late."

"Pizza? Man, I would kill for pizza. There was this place that used to have the…"

"Forget about it. Next thing ya know, you'll be talking about video games and all that junk." Red interrupted Surefoot. "What do you mean we have to make pizza before it's too late? Too late for what?"

"For everything," Tig said so quickly the letters in the words tumbled together.

"Not for everything, for something," his twin corrected. "Stumble says that if he doesn't get pizza…"

"…his world is going to end and all the ships at sea."

Surefoot gave Red a disgusted look. "So that makes more sense than talking about video games? What does 'all the ships at sea' even mean?"

"Mmmeremphs glowtrerst mnmnnnrobe zza?" I asked. I probably shouldn't have tried to ask a question when I had one of the sleeves of my pelt gripped between my teeth while yanking with my other arm to try to get my paws unstuck. I have to admit to being a tiny bit disconcerted when Surefoot answered me.

"Furball's right. How are we supposed to make pizza anyway? Stumble's the one who does all the cooking and if he made it, it'd end up being stew. Runny stew."

"Why's his world going to end if he doesn't get pizza?" Ursa asked in that thoughtful way of his.

Tig took a huge breath and let it out. It usually helped to calm him down. "We were talking about stuff and Leo said something about pizza and Stumble just went off the deep end. If it'd been anyone else, I'd have said he was crying. He said that he couldn't handle it anymore, that if he didn't get pizza his world was going to end."

"Did he say 'his world' or 'this world'?" Surefoot asked. "What? It's a good question. I mean he's in our world, but we aren't always in his world. So there's a huge difference if it's his or this. 'T' can be a mighty powerful letter. Really." There was complete silence for a couple of beats before Ursa spoke up.

"Well then we just gotta make him pizza."

"Can I throw it in the air and twirl it?" I asked, an image of slinging a perfect circular crust and catching it perfectly appearing in my head. Leo and Tig exchanged looks, rolled their eyes and shook their heads the exact same way as they walked over to me. Tig grabbed my right arm while Leo grabbed my left one.

"One…" Leo said.

"…two…"

"…three," they finished together and yanked. Nothing happened for a few moments and Tigger called out, "Harder." It felt as though someone was beating my palms with thorns, but they suddenly came apart causing Leo and Tig to go tumbling backwards to the ground.

"Thanks guys," I said as I looked to see how much skin was now missing from my palms. There wasn't nearly as much blood as the last time this had happened, so I was pleased.

"I better not see you near the gluepot anytime soon," Tig grumbled as he got to his feet. "What were you doing, anyway?"

"I had to fix my bow. It kept breaking."

"Your bow, but…" he stopped as Leo held up his hand.

"Don't worry about it, it won't make any sense and you'll just kick yourself for asking in the end anyway. Right now we gotta figure out how to make pizza before Stumble gets back."

"Back from where?"

Tig laughed. "Leo sent him with a couple of those gems we got from Hook's chest last time to sell them to the dwarves. He told him to haggle to get a good price for them."

"Oh geez, no rush there, then. Stumble won't be back for a couple weeks at least if you told him to haggle with dwarves." Roo was right. The last time one of us had made the mistake of trying to haggle with dwarves, the dwarves had gotten the better deal because we couldn't keep our eyes open for more than 37 hours.

It only took an instant to clear the common room table with the broom, although I was glad I didn't have kitchen duty this week since it's a pain to pick up stew remains off a dirt floor. On the bright side, only one gourd broke beyond repair, although if I'd been allowed near the gluepot I could probably fix it without any problem. Once the table no longer contained the leftovers from the last three meals, we gathered around it to discuss how to concoct pizza. Red said he couldn't understand why we just didn't get a spell from the elves but dropped that line of thought when he was reminded about the last time we'd used an elven spell. Three months later, we were still finding insect wings all over the Tree. Roo kept asking what pizza was and Surefoot kept trying and failing to explain it to him.

"Look, let's face it," Leo finally said as ideas were flung to and fro along with explanations of what a pizza could be, should be and might be. "The hardest thing is going to be making a crust. Once we got that licked, it shouldn't be too hard to get the rest of the stuff done. We got plenty of stuff here to use for everything else."

"There's some waybread we got for emergencies," Tig remembered. He went to a shelf and pulled out four good size pieces of waybread, each about the size of a square dinner plate. He scraped his sleeve across one, shook it, and finally blew on it causing a cloud of dust to rise from it.

"How old is that stuff?"

"It can't be that old, it ain't moldy." Tig dropped it on the table causing a couple of pieces to shatter.

"Waybread can't get moldy," I said as I picked up a piece. "Not even mold likes this stuff." I bit a small corner of one of the pieces and felt a tooth crack. "We can't use this stuff. It's hard as rock."

"You mean your head?"

"You better take that back?"

"What if I don't?"

"Then you'll wish you had."

"Make me."

"You wish."

"I know."

"Know what?"

Red stopped in mid-thought and looked confused. "Uh, I don't know."

"Told ya."

Red started to say something else but Roo got there first. "It's like soggy bread, right?"

"Naw his head is hard as rock."

"I meant the pizza crust."

Leo gave his patented 'leader' look and Red and I declared a truce for the moment. "Sort of," Surefoot said slowly. "Before it's cooked, that is."

"Then I got an idea." Roo jumped up and got the biggest gourd we had which was about the size of a small bucket. He half-filled it from the water barrel (reminding me I had water-hauling duty this week) and brought it over to the table. He picked up the pieces of waybread, dumped them in the water, and then began churning the liquid with his hands. In a little bit the waybread had dissolved and the gourd was filled with a very soupy whitish liquid. There was no way I was going to be throwing that anywhere and catching it.

"We need something else. It's almost good enough but we need to thicken it up some." Leo's insane optimism was probably another reason he was Peter's lieutenant.

"Hang on a second," I declared and dropped under the common room table where my pallet was. I opened the chest next to it, rooted through it and found a big burlap bag that I pulled out. I got back out from under the table, just missing braining myself on the edge, and dumped the bag on the table.

"What's that?" Ursa asked poking the back with a finger.

"Acorns."

"Acorns? You're what? Part squirrel or something? There must be five pounds of them in there."

"I just figured they might come in handy for something one day," I told Red.

"That's just…"

"If you say 'nuts' I'm going to kill you," Roo advised him.

"…good planning," Red finished smoothly although I know that wasn't close to what he'd been going to say. I picked up the bag and started slamming it against the tabletop.

"If we can break this stuff up enough, maybe it'll be like flour and we can thicken the 'dough'," I said between gasps of breath as I continued to slam it down.

"Where's your club?" Surefoot asked. I broke off from acorn abuse and retrieved my club, handing it to him. "Okay, hold the end there so it doesn't move," he directed me. He smashed the club on top of the back resulting in a resounding crunching sound from the bag's contents. "Much better," he declared as he started using the club with great alacrity. "This'll be done in no time."

A few minutes, and two 'accidental' hits to my paw, he decided the acorns had been pounded sufficiently. I picked up the bag and dumped the crushed acorns in the watery mixture. Roo churned the 'dough' again and ended up with something that had the consistency of thin mud. "Almost," I said with a sigh.

"This'll finish the job," Tigger said as he grabbed a handful of leaves that were used for… other purposes and dumped them in the dough concoction. Just to be sure Surefoot dipped a small gourd of stew from the stew pot and added it to the dough. Roo started churning so hard that his face turned red and sweat ran down his face into the mixture. By the time he was done, the mixture was dough-like, albeit dough that looked as though it had played in the mud.

"Can I do the tossing thing?" I asked excitedly. I wasn't sure what the big deal was, I didn't even like pizza, but thought it would be cool to do whatever it is they call throwing pizza dough in the air and catching it.

"Are your hands clean?" Leo asked doubtfully. It took a moment for all the laughter to die down from that question.

"They're cleaner than my feet," I allowed.

"Oh, well in that case…" he said, rolling his eyes. After several tries, I managed to pick up the dough without having it ooze through my fingers. It sill wasn't the right consistency, but was a lot better than it had been. I didn't quite twirl it but ended up more like throwing it in the air and trying to catch it. I missed. At least my paws did. Most of the 'dough' landed on my head.

"Maybe we should just roll it out on the cook stone," Ursa said as he helped scrape the stuff out of my hair and back into the bowl. By the time they were finished, it was hard to tell if there was more dough in my hair or more of my hair in the dough gourd. "Protein," was Tig's opinion, although even he looked a tad bit green.

Ursa dumped the 'dough' out of the gourd onto the almost flat rock next to the cooking fire. The 'dough' sizzled as it landed. I was pretty sure that pizza dough wasn't supposed to sizzle while cooking, nor was it probably supposed to smell like burning toast mixed with burning hair and other unidentified burning smells. "Wait a second, we need to get something to use for the sauce and the toppings," Red remembered. He looked frantically around the cooking area. "What the heck are we supposed to use? It's not like we got a jar of tomato sauce."

"Can. Tomato sauce comes in cans. It's spaghetti sauce that comes in bottles," Surefoot said with a deadpan expression. I'm almost positive he was being funny. Almost.

"Thank you so much for that information," Red said in a sarcasm frenzy. "You're not helping."

"Maybe I've got…" I started.

"No. No acorns or blueberries." I sighed and tried to decide whether that was worth pouting over or not. By this time, the pizza 'crust' was beginning to turn an ominous shade of burned. Tig darted to a corner of the common room and came back, dumping a bunch of dandelions on the pizza 'crust'. The flowers quickly started to turn brown.

"Seriously? Red's incredulous voice was in full… voice. "Why do we have all this stuff in here. Dandelions? Acorns? Next thing you know; someone is going to pull out a bunch of pine needles to add to this." I perked up and started to slide under the table again.

"Don't even think it and I don't even want to know why you collect pine needles."

"How much of a pirate do you think I am?" I demanded. "I don't collect pine needles." A bit more sheepishly, "They're just the ones I picked out of my pelt."

Light smoke that was anything but fragrant was now coming from the surface of the pizza dough and the dandelions had wilted into unrecognizable lumps. It was Leo who finally took action. He dipped a huge portion of stew from the stew pot and covered the top of the 'crust' with it. The burning toast/hair/unrecognizable smell turned to a smell eerily reminiscent of burning tires. Leo gave it about half a minute and then used a broken pitchfork (yes, Red commented on why there would even be a pitchfork on the Island, much less in Hangman's Tree) to remove it from the cooking stone and dump it on the common room table. All of us stood around the table and stared at the pizza that was half-raw and topped with stew sauce and bits and pieces of other things better left unexplored. I could see a couple of places in which clumps of formerly red hair were gathered. Pizza, sauce, and toppings were now every shade of gray imaginable with a few regions of charred black for contrast.

"This is pizza? I don't get what the big deal is all about," Roo said in a voice so full of disbelief it caused the rest of us to start laughing.

"I think we should probably wait to eat it until Stumble gets here," Ursa said. "It'd only be right." Personally, I figure he was hoping to get away with not trying it for as long as he could. I was glad I'd declared my anti-fondness for pizza months ago so no one would think I was trying to take an easy way out.

"Eat what?" a voice behind us asked. At some point Stumble had arrived in the common room through his trapdoor. I still didn't know why he was called Stumble since he could move as silently as the breeze when he wanted to. It was probably fortunate that he didn't normally want to.

"Uh, pizza?' Tigger said making it more a question than any sort of statement of fact.

"You made pizza?" Stumble asked. "Cause of what I said earlier? Really?" He looked at us and then at the questionable item on the common room table. "This is unexpected." Coming from Stumble, this was the equivalent of admitting to being surprised in epic proportions. I waited for a typical Stumble-comment that never came. He took his dagger and cut a piece of the pizza. I was fairly certain it was going to take a great deal of cleaning and honing before that dagger would be serviceable again. He took a bite and chewed. And chewed. And chewed some more. And chewed harder. And chewed hard enough to cause his jaw muscles to bulge. I'm pretty sure I heard the thump when he swallowed and it dropped into his stomach, but it could have been my imagination. I won't swear to it though. "This is the grossest thing I've ever eaten," he declared, carefully laying the remaining pieces of pizza on the table. "Not to mention that whatever you used to top this with tastes like garbage." That caused a lot of laughter. "Thanks, guys. I… thanks." Stumble doesn't grin a whole lot and when he does, it normally has massive overtones of sarcasm to it, but this was the type of grin that every kid should be wearing at least most of the time. It was probably the first time I'd ever seen Stumble look totally happy and it was awesome.

Needless to say, the pizza wasn't consumed. It sort of disappeared later that night and popular opinion is that it made its way back to the stewpot. I started collecting acorns again, along with the occasional pine needle. We never found out what the big deal about Stumble needing pizza was, but according to Red, he's been mentioning layer cake. Like that's going to happen.