"I wasn't asssssking you, assssshole!", the girl hissed at Steve Grenswalden. Steve was a clerk at Non-Human Companion Adoption Emporium, which was formerly called "PetShop", the name having been changed after receiving several bomb threats from PETA interspersed with deranged ramblings about the squirrel king which had been scrawled on their customer feedback forms in crayon. Steve wasn't sure exactly where he had gone wrong. Maybe he should have opted to take a more practical major in college than English, or maybe he should have finished that fourth year. He had been unable to get any of his work published, and when asked the publishers told him that his last name was "too long and German", and then proceeded to laugh and throw things at him. Maybe he had just dreamed that last part. In any case, he found that most businesses wanted somebody "experienced", either that or somebody with different credentials. He discovered that truly there were few depths that the unemployed would not sink to.

Eventually he found himself here, selling exotic pets that would begin succumbing to terminal illnesses while you were looking at them, psychotic birds, hyperactive dogs and cats, gerbils and hamsters that he could have sworn were plotting some sort of diabolical evil and one old and drowsy animal so lost in unkempt hair and sinking jowls and wrinkles that a trained veterinarian could not determine whether it was a dog, a cat, or a ferret. He had been given quite a hard day by the cell-phone using thirty-something woman and her three hyperactive children, and by the 70 year old man who kept ranting about modern music and television and finally bought a single tin of cat food before tottering out.

Then this girl came in. She was wearing a large raincoat, her face and hands concealed in its shadow and folds. What started the argument he couldn't remember. Maybe it was that annoying way she hissed all her sibilants, or her insistence that he provide the fattest feed rabbits and mice, or complaining that there were no snake vitamin pellets, only frog and reptile vitamin pellets, which were altogether insufficient diet supplements. Whatever it was, he regretted having said what he did. He regretted coming into work that day. He regretted getting this job. He regretted moving to jump city. He regretted growing past 12 years old. He regretted ever letting himself be pushed out of his mother's womb.

The raincoat had fallen back to reveal the girl, lightly clad in an oversized T-shirt and roomy comfortable sweatpants. Her skin was green and smooth, with a reflective luster equal to that of snake scales. Her eyes were a golden yellow, slit by pupils like black gashes. Her dark green hair was pulled into a loose braid that drooped over her left shoulder, and she showed her long sharp fangs as her tongue flickered in and out. Her mouth opened wider, stretching vertically and horizontally to an impossible size. He was entranced by the surreal horror. The great pink wet chasm opened and rush at him as he fell in. The monstrous mouth closed on him halfway down, his legs still sticking out, waving in confused circular slow-motion kicks.

"Spit him out, you don't know where he's been," Robin called.

"Mah heem gihamn?" the girl said, muffled by her oral captive. "You heard me," Robin said as he drew a birdarang in one hand and his pole in the other. Reluctantly she spewed out Steve in a dazed and shaking heap. She slowly backed up against the wall, crouched, and then sprung at Robin.

"Titans, go!"