Disclaimer: I still own nothing, Silver still owns half this fic, and I want a sandwich.
Diego's Family Affair
Chapter 2
August 26, 7:40 PM
Gatewater Hotel Ballroom
Diego shook his head in disbelief. He just knew something would go horribly wrong that night…but he never expected Alicia would bring all of the animals into the ballroom as well. He didn't even have a handkerchief to wipe the toucan poop off of Mia's head. "I told you this was a bad idea…" he began. However, before he could even finish his sentence, he found himself facedown on the ground, just narrowly missing a heap of some sort of animal dung. He felt sorry for whatever janitor would have to clean up after this party, but his thoughts were rudely interrupted as a large, orange ball of fur whammed itself into him and a strong pair of jaws clamped down around his right leg.
Diego let out an agonizing wail as the animal began to thoroughly mutilate his appendage. Mia slowly backed away. She didn't even realize she'd stepped in the pile of manure. But before the beast could cause any irreversible damage to Diego's leg, a T-bone steak seemed to fly through the air out of nowhere and splatter against the wall behind them, leaving a pinkish streak on the once-pristine wall as it slid down toward the carpet. The fully-grown jaguar bounded after the steak as if Diego weren't even there, leaving the attorney to attend to his own wounds.
"Awww, Baby Jaguar missed you!" Mia and Diego glanced up to see a woman about Mia's age staring down at them. As Diego pulled himself back to his feet, the right leg of the tuxedo he'd rented mauled beyond recognition, the woman laughed. In contrast with Mia and Diego's formerly stunning formal attire, she was dressed casually, almost to an absurd extent, in a pink T-shirt and orange shorts. Even stranger was the fact that instead of carrying a purse, she wore a lavender backpack with a rather creepy face embroidered into it.
"Mia…I'd like you to meet my cousin Dora." Diego explained as his girlfriend made her way over to shake hands with her boyfriend's relative.
"Errr…" Mia stammered, unable to look Dora in the eye for some reason. "It's nice to meet you…"
"You've arrived just in time!" Dora exclaimed with a silly grin on her face. "We need YOUR help to get…"
"Actually, I think I'd better freshen up in the powder room…" Mia cut in as she turned to leave. After the encounter with the jaguar, she figured it would probably be in her best interest to get out of that ballroom as soon as she found the opportunity...not to mention the fact that she was already questioning Dora's sanity, even though they had barely met.
Dora clamped a hand on Mia's shoulder. "That's great!" She nearly shouted in the lawyer's ear, confirming Mia's assessment of her mental stability. "I'll come along too! Now how do we get to the powder room?"
Mia took a step back and removed the strange woman's hand from her shoulder. "It's right by the reception desk in the lobby…" she stammered, "You really don't have to…"
"Who do we ask when we don't know which way to go?" Dora half-asked, half-shouted in Mia's face, all the while keeping that stupid grin plastered on her countenance. It was painfully apparent that Diego wasn't the only one in the family with an unhealthy caffeine addiction.
Mia just forced a grin in return. "I really should get going," she replied. Dora hadn't backed down one bit.
"That's right!" She exclaimed as though Mia had answered her question. "We need the Map! Now, if you want Map's help, you've got to say 'Map!'"
"What?" Mia recoiled again as Dora leaned in uncomfortably close to her in eager anticipation.
"Say 'Map!' Say 'Map!'" Urged Dora. About seven feet away, Diego had buried his face in his hands out of sheer humiliation.
"Uh…map?" Mia sheepishly stuttered.
Dora leaned in even closer to her cousin's date. Mia was astounded that this was even possible. "LOUDER!"
Mia cleared her throat and repeated "Map?" in a slightly louder voice. Apparently it wasn't good enough, because nothing had happened and Diego's creepy cousin was still staring at her. Dora's nose had to have been mere centimeters away from Mia's. Finally, overcome with complete and total frustration Mia screamed, "MAAAAAAAAAAP!" at the top of her lungs.
Somewhere up in a room on the third floor of the hotel, a man with spiky gray hair screamed in agony.
Back in the ballroom, however, Mia had backed into a wall. A piece of paper with a face on it had jumped out of Dora's backpack and started singing and bouncing all over the ballroom as if it were on crack cocaine. "You know, I really don't have to use the powder room anymore…" Mia cut in, but she was once again interrupted as a python slithered between the two of them, rubbing up against the rookie defense attorney's leg. Mia twitched and turned to Diego. "Let's go home, please…" she stuttered, keeping one eye on the snake the entire time.
"But you can't go yet!" Dora pleaded. "You haven't talked to Tuga or Linda or Boots or Kira or Iza yet! And Diego still hasn't seen Alicia!"
Mia hesitantly stepped over the python and made her way back to where Diego was examining the gashes "Baby" Jaguar had made in his leg. "Diego, go find your sister and make up with her so we can get out of this mess alive. You have got some serious explaining to do." She snapped. She glanced down at her once-pristine shoes and groaned. She had stepped in some more unidentifiable animal dung.
"Kitten, I tried to talk you out of it," Diego defended himself.
"Diego Armando, my dress is ruined, my hair is ruined, and my shoes are ruined." Mia shot back. "I spent the last few minutes of my life being harassed by a clinically insane woman and a talking piece of paper, which in retrospect I probably should have used to wipe this bird poop off my head!" She screamed at the man, nearly on the verge of tears. "I just want to go home!"
Diego resisted every urge to say "I told you so," and limped across the ballroom. He grimaced as he passed the water buffalo, which harmoniously farted in his face as he passed by. Mia followed him, holding her nose and making sure not to step in any more piles of manure.
The two of them made their way to the bar, where an older woman in khakis emblazoned with that omnipresent jungle seal was staring across the room at the two of them. It sent a chill up Mia's spine.
"Hola, Diego!" She exclaimed as Diego staggered over to the bar with one hand clamped around his scarred and bleeding shin.
"Alicia," he nodded.
"I was going through Mami and Papi's old things a couple of weeks ago," She told her younger brother as she dug deep into the oversized pockets on her shorts. "Look what I found!"
She pulled out a tiny, crumpled piece of orange canvas and smoothed it out on the bar. Upon closer examination, Mia noticed that it had a face similar to the one on Dora's map and backpack. "What the heck is THAT?" She asked Diego, cringing.
Before Diego could offer anything remotely resembling an explanation, the bag sprang to life as if on cue. "Rescue Pack, comin' to the rescue!" It sang as Latin music suddenly filled the air. Mia glanced from Diego to the dancing backpack and back again, at a total loss for words.
"I see you found Baby Jaguar," Alicia observed as the dancing, gyrating container finished its performance. Diego nodded solemnly. Words couldn't even begin to express his utter annoyance with the situation at hand.
Alicia smiled and added, "Animal Control was going to put him down when we found out he had rabies, but Dora and I teamed up to rescue him just in time!" She flashed her brother a grin. "I just wish you'd been there to see it!"
The defense attorney's eye twitched. "Wait…did you just say 'rabies?'" He asked. He was almost afraid of Alicia's answer.
Alicia, however, acted as though she didn't hear him and just prattled on. She was completely absorbed in her own little world. She hadn't even noticed Mia at all. "You've changed, Diego. You used to care so much about helping animals in trouble..."
Diego, in turn, ignored her and snatched his old Rescue Pack up from the bar. "Hey, Rescue Pack," he pleaded. "Turn into a rabies vaccine! I beg you!"
The Rescue Pack looked up. "DIEGO!" It shouted with a grin sickening enough to rival Dora's.
"You talk to backpacks." Mia flatly stated. "I swear, it's like I don't even know you anymore."
Diego broke into a cold sweat all over again. "It's not what you think, Mia!" He tried to explain to her. "It all happened when I was a kid! That part of my life is over now!" He refocused his attention to the Rescue Pack, which had begun to sing and dance all over again. He crumpled it up into a little ball with his massive hands and pegged it in Alicia's face. "I can't believe you brought a rabid jaguar into a hotel!" He shouted. "Are you crazy? Does security even know about this?"
"In English we say 'crazy,'" Alicia cheerfully replied, confirming her brother's suspicions. "But in Spanish, we say 'loco!'"
"This is just lovely…" Muttered Diego as he turned to check up on Mia. Much to his chagrin, his girlfriend had disappeared. "Mia…?"
The rescue pack hopped back into his hands and turned into a pair of binoculars, which the defense attorney used to scan the room. He spotted Mia near the center, staring at the ceiling. Her hairdo was totally lopsided at this point, her skirt was streaked with suspicious brown stains, and she was nearly in tears. "Mia, what's going on?" He asked as he limped over to where she was standing, leaving the binoculars on the bar stool behind him.
Mia said nothing and pointed up at the chandelier, where two monkeys in tuxedoes were tossing her sparkly clutch purse back and forth between themselves.
Diego slapped his own forehead in frustration as Alicia seemed to pop out of thin air from behind them and elaborated. "It's the Bobo Brothers!" She exclaimed. Diego resisted every urge to scream obscenities at his older sister. He hadn't even noticed that she'd followed him across the room! "If you want to stop the Bobos, you know what you have to do!"
Diego glanced over at Mia. "Please, Alicia." He begged. "I've screwed this date up enough. She already thinks I'm as loco as you and Dora are…"
Alicia remained firm in her own cheery way and insisted, "Hermanito, do YOU want to get the nice lady's purse back from the Bobo Brothers?"
Up on the chandelier, one of the monkeys had begun to put on Mia's lipstick. The other dumped a pile of tampons out of the purse, and about four of them bounced off of Diego's head. "Alicia, can't you say it just this once?" He pleaded.
"But it's so much better when you say it, Diego!"
"Not anymore!" Diego snapped. "I don't want anything to do with your ridiculous rescuing from now on! I just want to live a normal life with a normal job and a normal caffeine problem!"
"Say it louder!" Alicia exclaimed with a grin as though he'd said something relevant the first time.
Diego didn't know how to react. The room was so silent he could hear the water buffalo farting all the way by the hors d'oeuvres. He sighed for what seemed like the hundredth time that night, raised an index finger as if he were about to make an objection, and shouted at the top of his lungs, "FREEZE, BOBOS!"
The monkeys stopped dead in their tracks, and the one holding Mia's purse immediately dropped it into the punch bowl, where it was summarily ingested by Kira the Crocodile.
Alicia gasped. "Oh no!" She exclaimed, staring off into space with that same stupid, blissfully ignorant grin on her face. "Kira accidentally swallowed a purse! Al rescate!" And with that, Diego's older sister sprinted and bounded over to the punch bowl.
Diego seized the opportunity to snatch Mia by the arm and drag her, limping all the way, to the door. "Well, you saw my crazy family, I saw my crazy family…I think we are done here."
"That purse cost four hundred dollars…" Mia muttered to no one in particular. She was still in shock.
"Crocodiles sometimes swallow rocks when they…" Diego began, but he caught himself mid-sentence before he could slip into his allegedly dormant animal aficionado mode. "Don't worry, Kitten," he reassured her as they made their way back to the lobby as fast as he could run on a mangled leg, "We're lawyers. I'll just sue Alicia for every penny she's worth.
Mia dodged an awkward glance from the receptionist and scowled. "She can't be worth much."
Diego was about to reply, but then he realized Mia had a point.
The two of them left the hotel and began the long trek across the parking lot to where Diego had parked his car. "Listen, Diego," Mia suddenly uttered after a long, awkward silence. "I really don't know if I can keep seeing you after this. I mean, I know they're your family and all, but that thing with the monkeys and the talking backpack seriously creeped me out, not to mention that snake…"
"Kitten, I can explain everything if you'll just…" Diego began, but Mia cut him off.
"I just think there's too much you've been hiding from me," she snapped. "The next thing you'll be telling me is how all of these animals could talk, and that at one point in your messed-up life you had to dive underwater to put the moon back together…"
Diego struggled to find the right words, but he soon found himself just babbling almost incoherently at the woman. "Mia, I was eight! My parents are in a mental institution now! I didn't exactly grow up in a stable environment!"
"My mother warned me about men like you," Mia sighed. "Drive me home. I never want to speak of this night again."
Diego decided at that point that he would need a lot more than just coffee to get him through the next day.