Please see the last chapter for credits.

August 15th, 1990

The hotel had seen better days.

Once, Hotel Aloha was one of the premiere destinations in the Hawaiian Islands, its verandas offering unsurpassed views of sunrise and sunset on the beaches of Kazookai. The hotel owned the tiny island, and every aspect of its existence was micro-managed to fit an exact schedule. But it was this demand for perfection in a tropic clime that proved the hotel's downfall. The manager had installed an artificial volcano on the island, a volcano so huge it dwarfed the buildings at its base. For years, it had erupted into a fireworks show every night at precisely 8:30.

Eventually, the mechanism controlling the volcano proved vulnerable to high humidity. At least, that's what the mechanic told the owner of Hotel Aloha after the disaster. "You're lucky it was only marshmallows," he said. "Imagine if that was a real volcano." This was little condolence for the owner. Most of his employees left him on Marshmallow Day, including his valet, his clerk, and his bellhop. Now he had to park the cars and check in the guests and take the bags. He would have done this gladly if anyone came to his hotel, but Hotel Aloha was now the laughing stock of the tourist industry, and nobody came to lie on the beaches and ride the waves off Kazookai anymore. The owner didn't blame the humidity for his calamity, and he didn't blame Pele. He blamed the largest native inhabitants of the island at the time he had bought it—the mice. How else would marshmallows end up in an artificial volcano?

The walls of one of the hotel's many abandoned bedrooms were quite close by human standards, but they still towered above the body of the still mouse. Luwai'ni was awake, but she lay still for several minutes with her eyes closed, hoping the world would just go away. Finally, reluctantly, she opened her eyes, her focus drifting from the plush carpet in her face to the curled form of the sleeping Shaka-Baka at the other end of the room.

"Still in the land of the living," she muttered under her breath. The sentiment was meant as much for herself as for her boyfriend.

Carefully, she lifted herself into a sitting position and waited to see if her body decided to disagree with her today. Considering the events of the previous night, it was something of a minor miracle that she was able to stand, but stand she did.

A few minutes later, she had made her way to the bathroom. She carefully closed the large door behind her then crawled up the bathroom vanity to the countertop. By stacking a couple of bars of soap atop one another, she was able to get high enough to see her face in the wall mirror. Putting her hands on the wall, she leaned forward and stared deeply into her reflection, as if she was trying to spot her soul. This was a daily ritual for her, at least on those mornings when she could find some privacy and something reflective to gaze into. Satisfied at last that nothing was missing, she finally turned to her looks. When she was finally satisfied that she had achieved the appearance of a woman who didn't know she was beautiful, she made a running leap from the countertop onto the bathroom doorknob. In a well-practiced motion, she continued across the top of the knob, using her feet to turn it before making another leap at the far wall, where the towels were hung. She hit the towel and clung fast, then quickly made her way down to the floor just as the door had swung open far enough for her to stride through.

There on the other side stood Shaka-Baka. "Happy birthday, Luwai'ni!" he proclaimed.

"Hooray for me," Luwai'ni deadpanned.

The hotel had an overabundance of food for the guests that was continuously on the verge of spoilage (blame the humidity), so breakfast for the two mice was no problem. Afterwards, Luwai'ni followed Shaka-Baka as he led her to the island's dock, asking him several times along the way to repeat the conversation he had overheard the night before. The going was slow, as she was carrying a stuffed suitcase with her. Standing on the last of the pilings, she leaned forward and let her eyes dance along the waves to the horizon, trying to imagine the mainland of North America in all of its immensity far to the west.

"That's it, then," she concluded. "We're leaving tonight."

The large mouse behind her said nothing, looking with sadness at the only thing he had brought, a handcrafted surfboard.

The look did not escape Luwai'ni's notice. "I hear there are some great beaches in California," she told him over her shoulder. "The surfing off of Monterey..."

Shaka-Baka cut her off, as this was the one subject on which he was an authority. "Not like Kazookai, babe. Nothing's like Kazookai to a mouse surfer."

"I suppose," she agreed reluctantly. She turned to face him as she made her decision. "Look, you don't have to come, Shaka-Baka. You'd be just as out of place as I will be, and you know I'm capable of taking care of myself."

"Stop talking like that," the surfer replied with a frown. "We're in this together, remember? 'Together till the bitter end,' you said. And it's a little bitter now, with, like, no tribe and all, but we still got each other, you know?" He smiled at her in the goofy way he knew she liked.

Sure enough, she was soon sporting a goofy grin to match his. "Fine, be that way," she said in a mock-pout. "I suppose we could waste my birthday riding the Kazookai surf one last time."

"Woo-hoo!" shouted Shaka-Baka, grabbing her arm and diving into the ocean from the edge of the post.

The two mice went from ocean to beach and back a seemingly endless number of times in the hours that followed. As usual on such occasions, Luwai'ni found a simple happiness that was foreign to her nature from being close to Shaka-Baka.

After she told him this was their last run, he paddled the board and her far, far out into the ocean. He barely had time to turn around and stand up before the wave had them. She stood behind him on the board, her arms around his waist.

I would be dead if I was doing this by myself, Luwai'ni thought to herself. I just don't have the knack. Thinking to myself at a time like this is probably a good reason for that. Just look at him—there's absolutely nothing going through that head right now. No, that's not fair, there's all kinds of complicated technical stuff about staying on the water and balancing the board going through his head, it's just that none of it is words. He just seems to find his place in the universe, and the universe gives him everything he wants. Including me, maybe? Why can't I be anything like that? Wow, this is a really long wave. I wonder how long it could possibly...

CRASH!

Luwai'ni landed on her head. Actually, considering how much bigger proportionately mice heads are than human heads, this is a very common landing position, leading to an awful lot of neck problems in professional mice surfers. The fact that Shaka-Baka had no neck to speak of was therefore quite an advantage.

Luwai'ni flipped herself upright before anyone could see her in such a position (the beach was abandoned, so this was more force of habit than anything) and set to work wringing out her hair. She stopped when she saw Shaka-Baka reverently place his board on a receding wave.

She walked up to him. "What are you doing?" she asked.

"A good board will only work for the beach it's built for. I'll make another one in Monterey." The mouse kept his eyes on the board slowly receding into the distance. "Besides, you said to pack light."

Luwai'ni shrugged. She had never heard anything about one-beach surfboards from any other surfer, so she figured it was just superstition on Shaka-Baka's part. This was no surprise, as Luwai'ni had observed (and learned to exploit) long ago the fact that everyone was superstitious. Luwai'ni prided herself that her own superstitions were completely different than those of anyone else she had ever met. She thought this meant that hers were the only ones to have a basis in fact.

Shaka-Baka turned back around to face her. For a moment, Luwai'ni thought he had caught her sarcastic gesture earlier, but instead he grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her around so that the setting sun was just behind her head. He stepped back in satisfaction and then got down on one knee.

"Luwai'ni," he said, producing a polished coral ring from the pocket of his bathing suit, "you're the most beautiful girl in the whole wide world. Will you marry me?"

The girl glanced ruefully back at the sun and sighed. "Will you stop doing that, please?" she said, pleadingly. "I can't marry you. I can't marry anybody, ever."

Shaka-Baka's lower lip trembled slightly, but he had promised that he wouldn't cry this time. "Why?" he asked.

Luwai'ni was surprised. He never got to "why" before. "I can't love, that's why," she explained, as nicely as she could. "Even you should have noticed that." Well, maybe she could be a little nicer than that. "The only person I've ever cared about is me. Call it faulty wiring, but most emotions just don't come naturally to me."

"I don't believe you."

Wow, he really is trying, isn't he? "No, it's true. I'm utterly heartless."

"What about your revenge on that mouse?"

"Gadget Hackwrench? I was just creeped out at the last minute because she looks just like me. How would you like throwing your double into a double-boiler?"

He gave her a skeptical look. She tried to stand up to the scrutiny, before turning away with a scowl.

"Oh, quit it!" she said, dismissively. "You're going to force me to pull out the heavy ammunition, aren't you?"

"I still love you, Luwai'ni," Shaka-Baka announced.

Luwai'ni gritted her teeth. "Alright, you asked for it!" she cried. "Stay here," she warned, before dashing over to her suitcase. She returned with an old folded piece of paper. "Sit!" she commanded as she fell into a crossed legs position, and he followed suit.

"As you might be able to suspect by the hair and fur color, I'm not a native. I was raised in the San Cristobel orphanage, going back as far as I can remember. I had always dreamed about escaping that place and the guy who ran it (he called himself The Boss, and he used us to con dumb rich folks) and then making a place for myself in the world, but first, I had to find out about my parents. I knew where the cabinet was with all the little secrets inside, and I knew the combination from when I was six. But I didn't think I could get in and out without getting caught. In, yes, but not out. So I waited until I was sure I could survive on my own before I finally did it.

"There was no record of my father. For my mother, there was only a death certificate and a photograph. She had no name, only 'Jane Doe,' and she had died at the mission where they keep the lepers and the mental patients. The photograph let me know which category she belonged to."

At this point she handed the photograph to Shaka-Baka. For a moment, she started to turn away, but then she decided that she wanted to see his reaction.

At first, there was no reaction, but that was soon replaced by confusion, as the mouse looked at the scene of several panicked humans at an airport. It took a few minutes to find the tiny figure of the mouse at the top of the picture, the most carefully preserved part of the photograph. The figure, Luwai'ni's mother, looked almost like an exact duplicate of her daughter as she looked now. Her hair was longer and disheveled, and she was wearing an unexpected outfit, a male pilot's uniform that didn't fit her very well, topped off with a pair of goggles resting on her forehead. She was hanging from a lighting fixture and shouting at the top of her lungs. Shaka-Baka even smiled a bit at the woman's appearance. Then it finally occurred to him to combine the mouse with the rest of the picture. His face now finally reflected the endpoint Luwai'ni was expecting, a mixture of shock, horror and fear.

"She, she tried to expose us, didn't she?" The accusation was whispered because it was unimaginable, the worst crime possible to any animal, to reveal their intelligence to a human.

"By all rights," Luwai'ni continued, "the world should have come to an end on that day. But I guess somebody must have got really lucky, because we're all still here living outside of cages.

"It was while I was looking at that picture that I was caught. I mean, I was glued to the spot for what felt like days, so of course I'd get caught. The Boss decided to punish me in the worst way imaginable: he took me to the mission to hear the story from Sister Katherine, the nun who took care of my mother before she died.

"It happened at the Honolulu airport. She was put into a rodent jail there until somebody could figure out what to do with her. They only knew three things: she had come over on a flight from San Francisco, she was alone and completely out of her mind, and every creature in Hawaii wanted to kill her.

"The guy in charge gladly gave her over to Sister Katherine when she offered to take the woman away someplace where nobody was going to find her. Apparently, no news of the outside world ever gets out to Kazookai, because I've never heard anyone talk about her until the day of my visit.

"Sister Katherine told me what was wrong with my mother. She called it skitzo..." Lawai'ni closed her eyes and tried to visualize the biggest word in her vocabulary. "Schizophrenia. It means that she was stuck inside her head, that she thought her nightmares were real life. And they were really bad nightmares, because she used to scream whenever she had strength enough to do so. She never talked, not after she left the airport. Sister Katherine said that my mother was in the early stages of pregnancy when she arrived, and she died giving birth to me. They never figured out who she was—the San Francisco police thought she might have been living at their airport for a few days, but had originally arrived on some other plane, so she could have come from anywhere in the world. Nobody ever came to look for her, but if she was dashing from one plane to another, maybe my father just lost her. Or maybe he has...schizophrenia...too, and he's locked up on some other island on the other side of the Earth.

"So, to finish up the story, The Boss made my life even worse than it was before, I made sure he went to jail for the sort of things he was forcing us orphans to do for him, and I escaped into the jungle. You found me, and here we are."

Shaka-Baka sat there for a few minutes, and then scratched his head. "So why can't I marry you again?"

Luwai'ni screamed in frustration. "Because I'm her, Shaka-Baka!"

"No you're not."

"Look at the picture! I look just like her."

"But you're not her."

Luwai'ni put her face in her hands. "Let me try to explain this," she said, looking up at him. "Schizophrenics don't start out that way. Something happens to them, and slowly but surely they lose the ability to tell what's real and what's not. My mother was sane enough to live by herself in a San Francisco airport, and unable to speak by the time she got to this island. That's what's going to happen to me."

"You don't know that. I've heard of people like that who had normal children."

"But I'm not normal! I do bad things to people, and I don't feel sorry. I tried to destroy the village that had taken me in and given me a better life than I could possibly have expected. And what about what I did to that Gadget? She could have been the one link to my family, and I tried to kill her and her friends three different times."

"Well, you were under a lot of stress."

"STRESS!"

"And even if you are becoming like your mother, I don't care. I still want to be with you, Lawai'ni. You're the only person who ever cared about me, and I care about you. No illness is going to get in the way of that."

The girl was moved by this pledge, perhaps for only the second time in her life. She turned around and looked at the boat, which had arrived half an hour ago and was now boarding passengers. She turned around to see Shaka-Baka holding out his hand with the ring on it. "So?" he asked. "Will you marry me or not?"

She took the ring and put it in the suitcase along with the photograph. "I'll think about it on the trip. You know we won't be able to have children?"

"That's OK. I probably wouldn't be a very good parent. I'd probably lose them."

Luwai'ni laughed out loud. "I think I'd be a much worse parent than you."

"We could always adopt."

"Will you get on that boat!"