(AN: I apologize for the huge delay on this! I had to get back to school, and then there was all this crazy sorority hoop-jumping bullshit. The next chapter may take me a little while too, because we're still working on formal recruitment, but hopefully there shouldn't be too long of a wait any more. In payment, please accept longer chapter lengths for both chapter 6 and chapter 7! Thanks again for being patient.)

CHAPTER 6: Unopened

"What's going on, Sasha?" asked Raz, totally confused

"Follow me, it's urgent. Oh, hello Miss Zanotto. But no time for pleasantries." He strode briskly back into the lab, and Raz and Lili followed, half-curious and half-nervous. What would make Sasha act like this?

"We don't have much time," Sasha continued as they hurried through the facility. "I've tried everything I can think of, but nothing has been successful. In here." Sasha opened a door that Raz had never really seen before and ushered them into a very strange room.

It appeared to be someone's living space - a girl, from the decor, and a rather messy one at that. A wide, squat bed with a green and purple floral-pattern comforter and far too many pillows filled one entire corner. There was a small desk on the opposite wall. A strange sort of tank or cage of some kind filled the wallspace between, a huge sprawling habitat for some lucky pet. Taped up haphazardly all over the walls was a disjointed collage of glossy, cut-out images - there were lots of pictures of turtles, some fancy cakes from cooking magazines or even bridal catalogues, bunches of flowers, dark gloomy European castles, brains, glowing yellow eyeballs....

It occurred to both Raz and Lili in about the same instant. This was Sheegor's room.

"Sheegor's missing?" gasped Raz, jumping to the most obvious conclusion. Raz was Sasha's supposed "kidnapping specialist," after all.

"What?" cried Sasha. "Oh, no, it's not that. She's just on vacation visiting family. No..." Sasha's wall came down and he actually started fussing. "It's that turtle!" He gestured dramatically to the giant turtle habitat and its multi-colored tubes and boxes. "I followed her exact directions! I gave it those chocolate-covered turtle food pellets twice a day and replenished its water supply every other day! I turned on the light jazz music at night, and I kept the room at the right temperature and with the right amount of light. What have I done?" He shook his head, pressing a gloved hand to his face in dismay.

"Whoa, whoa, Sasha, slow down!" said Raz. "The turtle? What's wrong with him?"

Sasha sighed. "It won't come out of its shell. It's been like this for a day and a half, just curled up in there. Sheegor's going to be back in less than an hour, and...and I think I've killed it."

"Calm down, Sasha, just calm down. You haven't killed the turtle."

"Are you sure?" quipped Lili. "I've seen what this guy can do to houseplants."

"You're not helping!" Raz turned back to Sasha. "Look, I'm sure the turtle's okay. Maybe there's just something wrong with him. Could he be sick?"

"But I did everything exactly like she told me to," Sasha protested weakly.

"Well, I don't really know how to help, Sasha."

Sasha perked back up at this. "But that's just it, Razputin! You're going to get inside that turtle's head and figure out what's wrong!"

"Me?" echoed Raz. "Is this what you wanted me for? You could have done that yourself!"

"You have experience!" Sasha insisted. "You've been inside the brain of an animal before."

"Yeah, but that animal was a giant, mutant lungfish! It was practically sentient!"

"This turtle can talk," Lili pointed out.

"Still not helping!"

"Besides," Sasha added, "astral projection is your field of specialty. I'm just a telepathist. If we were shooting the turtle, or broadcasting it a message, I'd have no trouble, but - "

"Okay, okay, I'll go inside the freaking turtle!" Raz finally said. "But! You have to do something for me."

"Anything, Razputin, I'm begging you," said Sasha. "If anything goes wrong with this turtle, I'm going to have one angry lab assistant on my hands. If you think her voice is irritating when she's speaking normally, imagine her when she's furious!"

"Yikes, good point," said Raz. "What I need from you is to get us Milla's Moral Compass."

Sasha made a face. "She doesn't like loaning that thing out, she's very attached to it. And I would feel bad going behind her back like this. Why don't you just ask her directly?"

"Because I'm fourteen," Raz said flatly. "And fourteen is like, nine in Milla years."

"You have a point. Well, I hope you're using it for something important. It'll be my ass she kicks if anything happens to it."

"Oh, I don't imagine Milla could stay angry at you for very long, Sasha," Lili said teasingly.

"...You're right, Razputin, she's not really helping, is she."

Raz laughed, and reached into his backpack for his psycho-portal. Sasha opened up the turtle's home and pulled the reptile in question out, setting him on Sheegor's desk.

"Where do I put this thing if I can't stick it on his head?"

"I suppose just placing it at the front of the shell will do."

"Well, here goes nothing." Raz hefted the little door in one hand and grabbed Lili's wrist with the other.

"Wait - me?"

"Oh yeah. You're coming too," said Raz. "If we're trying to get this done in record time, I'm gonna need all the help I can get."

"Why not take Sasha?"

"I need to stay out here and guard," said Sasha. "If Sheegor gets back before the two of you are through, I'll need to stall for time."

"You're not scared, are you Lili?"

"Ch, no," Lili argued, though Raz wasn't quite convinced. "I've just...well, I've only been in a couple of people's brains before, and never a turtle. And astral projection isn't my specialty, I'm a telekinetic!"

"Then I guess you'll have to hang on tight."

She grabbed him around the waist. Raz stuck the portal solidly to the front of the turtle, slipped his goggles into place, and drifted out of his own head, with Lili not far behind him.

-xxx-

"Whoa."

Green. Everything was just so...green.

Well, okay, a lot of it was white too. There was a vast, round castle looming up in front of them, and its stone walls were a pale, marbley white. But with veins of green running through it, and decorative ivy (also green) crawling up the sides in places. The grass beneath their feet was a thick, lush green as well, the intense green that grass is immediately after it rains. And behind them, as Raz turned around to look, was a thick moat of water, surrounding the castle. The water was a cool, clear green, with small white flowers and green lily pads floating in it, and there was no drawbridge.

"I guess turtles wouldn't need one," he mumbled.

"Need what?" asked Lili, to his left.

"A drawbridge to get across the moat."

"Neither would we, really - we could just levitate."

"You could levitate," Raz corrected with a scowl.

"Oh, that's right," Lili said with a wince. "Your curse, it - "

"Stops my psychic abilities from working. Howie at the office says it's a panic override that blocks out parts of my brain so that all I focus on is basic instincts. To preserve my health."

"So weird. And you're sure you can't get a specialist to disengage that?"

"Not as long as the curse is in place."

"So I guess we better keep working on that."

They both turned to face the white marble castle again. It really was oddly constructed - the main, base part of the castle was vaguely cylindrical, and about a third of the way up or so was a balcony that encircled the entire thing (green, of course). Another similar balcony split the remaining height of the castle. Then, sticking up out of the top, there were four slim towers, placed evenly from one another and from the edge of the castle in a sort of square. These towers all had what looked like big lanterns or torches mounted at the top, though none of them were lit.

Lili gasped suddenly. "It's a cake!"

Confused, Raz studied the castle again, and it kind of clicked. The balconies were the middle layers of frosting! And the towers with their lanterns were the unlit birthday candles.

"It is a cake," Raz echoed. "Crap, I'm hungry now. We should have had lunch first!"

"Think with your brain, not your stomach," said Lili. "Let's head inside and get to the bottom of this."

"Or the cream-filled center," Raz mused, still lost in thought about tasty desserts. Lili rolled her eyes and grabbed his arm, tugging him along for a few paces before he snapped out of it. They circled the castle-cake until they found the tall, wide door inside, which miraculously was wide open. There were two guards, one posted on either side of it, but they weren't doing a whole lot of guarding.

"It's just like the real Pokeylope," Lili marveled, crouching down to look at one of them. A helmet and a spear were lying on the ground next to him, and the turtle himself was completely retracted inside of his shell.

Raz was messing with the other one. "Hello in there?" he called, but it didn't budge, so he nudged the shell lightly with his foot. The curve of the turtle's underbelly made it rock back and forth. When he still didn't open up, Raz knocked firmly on the outside.

"These guys are really closed up," he finally said.

"Maybe we'd have better luck inside," said Lili.

So they continued onward, into the large entryway of the castle. There were curving hallways to the left and right, and in front of them lay another large door that led into the center of the castle.

"Left, right, or forward?" Raz asked Lili.

"Might as well go left first. We'll try to find someone who can tell us what's going on."

They headed off down the lefthand hallway. Soon they began to figure out that the floor-level of the castle was the servants' quarters. They passed several locked doors before finding one that opened. The room beyond was plain, but looked comfortable, and the turtle living in it was tucked neatly inside its shell on the floor with no sign of having moved for a while.

"I'm sensing a trend here," Raz grumbled.

"We should keep going anyway," said Lili.

They continued onward around the curving hall, encountering several more rooms with motionless turtles inside them, in addition to a bathing room, a carpenter's workshop and what appeared to be a kitchen. The bath attendant turtle, carpenter turtle, and cook turtle were also withdrawn. By the time they made their way back around the cake's circumference to the place where they'd begun, no turtle had been able to help them.

"I guess we try in here, then," said Raz, heading toward the central room. They had to open the wide door telekinetically since the beam holding it in place was so heavy. Inside, they descended a couple steps to the main floor and looked around, marveling. It was a huge atrium of a room, with the ceiling extending all the way up to the castle's roof. Set into the walls were two layers of balcony and walkway, where the rooms on the upper floors opened onto the atrium. A set of glass elevators on the other side of the room led up to those levels.

Between the elevators and the place where Raz and Lili stood, however, was a very large throne, and on that throne sat a not-very-large turtle who looked very familiar.

"Pokeylope!" Raz cried, and darted across the marble floor to him, but he looked inside his head just as he looked outside in the real world. He was completely withdrawn into his shell. Lying next to him on the throne was his tiny golden crown.

"Just like everyone else," Raz said with a frown.

"What's this?" Lili wondered. She picked up an object from the floor at the foot of the throne. It was a broad, silver platter with a few brown crumbs and smears of pink still stuck to it.

"He sure loves his cake, doesn't he," said Raz, examining what was left of the chocolate treat. "Man, I wish there were still some of that left, because I would totally eat it."

"Why would he suddenly clam up like this and not even clean up after his cake?" Lili wondered, gesturing with the plate still in her hand. It passed in front of the turtle shell for a brief second - and in that brief second, the shell twitched, all on its own.

"What'd you do?" Raz cried.

"Do? What did I do?" She looked at him like he was crazy, but he took the plate from her hand and tried it again. Slowly, he waved the remains of the cake under where Pokeylope's nose should be, and the turtle rocked back and forth, staying curled up but definitely taking notice.

"I think he wants more cake," said Raz. "Maybe they all do, you think?" He stood back up and turned to Lili, but she wasn't there. Instead, she had crossed the room to a broad tapestry that was hanging on the wall, just inside the door, so they'd mostly missed it when they'd entered.

"Uh, Raz?" she called out to him.

"What is it?"

"How much time do you think we have in here before Sheegor roasts Sasha alive?"

He headed over to stand beside her and looked up at the tapestry too, curious as to what she was getting at. Slowly, the reality of their situation started to sink in.

Listed on the tapestry was a huge index of every person living inside the castle - "Marzipan Palace," apparently. There seemed to be forty or fifty turtles, servants and nobles alike, with names anywhere from "Carapastian VI of Sauntershire" to "Bill." And next to each and every name was what appeared to be his or her favorite variety of cake. King Samuel Pokey-Loper, at the top of the list, corresponded with "strawberry-frosted chocolate."

"You don't suppose - "

"These are the only things that will snap them out of it," Lili groaned. "What the hell? I wanna know who ever heard of a turtle that likes cake! Turtles eat bugs and plants and stuff!"

"How the heck are we supposed to come up with like forty different kinds of cake, anyway?" said Raz. "We don't know which turtles are which, except for Pokeylope, and I guess maybe we could figure out who 'Carpenter Steve' and 'Chef Archibald' are - "

They froze, and lifted their gazes to match one another. Then something snapped, and they were both scrambling.

"What's it say for him?"

"Lemon cake with powdered sugar. That should be easy enough, right?"

"If we're lucky enough we can probably find a recipe in there and crank this out. But come on, we've gotta hurry!"

They bolted out of the throne room, around the outside hallway and into the kitchen, and started making a cake.

-xxx-

Bakers they weren't.

They'd been levitating ingredients off the shelves like crazy, this way and that, flour and sugar flying everywhere. They'd made a horrendous mess of the kitchen, which made Raz feel bad a little, but they were having to go as quickly as possible, and he really did think they'd managed to cut down on time. Lili found something they thought was probably meant for baking cakes in, and they'd beaten eggs and stirred batter and finally thrown everything together in the pan. But now what they had to do was wait for it to cook. And Raz was exhausted.

He'd slumped against the oven door, sitting on the floor. Lili was propped on a stool, her face buried in the crook of her arms against the table. She looked pretty tired too.

"How much longer?" he whined feebly.

"I think we've got forty minutes," said Lili with a groan. "How long is that gonna translate out from brain-time into real-world time?"

"I dunno," said Raz.

They fell silent again. Raz looked down at his sweater and picked off a drying drip of cake batter.

"I...I never thought that I'd end up having to make a cake to save my dad," Raz said after a while, smiling a little at how absurd it was.

"Geez, Raz, I'd almost forgotten about your dad," Lili said guiltily. "I keep shifting to the next immediate goal. Do you...think he's okay?"

"I know he is," Raz insisted. "He's my dad."

She rolled her head up, slowly, and looked at him. Smudged across her nose was a little bit of flour, or maybe it was the powdered sugar. It made her look especially cute, and if Raz could have motivated himself to get up from the floor, he might have kissed it away.

"Raz..." she said softly. "What happened to your mother?"

The question took him by surprise, and he was a bit taken aback by it. But at the same time...he'd known her for four years, and never gotten around to telling her this? "The curse took her," he said, "like it got my grandfather."

"But that doesn't make sense. Your mom was only an Aquato by marriage, right?"

"Yeah," he said, "but the curse activated on her after they were together for seven years." He smiled, a little sadly. "It's funny, they say it might not have gotten her at all if she just hadn't changed her last name."

"That's terrible."

"I don't believe that, though," said Raz. "She was so dedicated to the circus...she was always an Aquato at heart."

"Geez, Raz," said Lili, "you've been through so much. I always just thought they were divorced." Almost like an afterthought, she added, "Like my parents."

"What drove them apart, anyway?" asked Raz. "Since we're getting personal, and all."

"Dad's job," she said. "Like there's much of a question there. She's not a psychic, so there were a lot of things he couldn't tell her, and she was really frustrated at how his job was so secretive. Finally, right around the time I was born, he revealed that side of himself to her, and she was really weirded out by it, so she decided to leave. She couldn't really take it any more." Lili paused, and cocked her head, dislodging some of the flour. "She almost won custody of me, too, since courts like to side with the mom and all. But my dad was the one providing for the household - and then they figured out that I was psychic, too, so they wanted me to stay with the psychic parent. Which makes a lot of sense."

"You seem so chill with all of that," said Raz.

"I was just a baby, so I never really grew up with her," she said. "I'm totally used to it. I think it would be weirder if she just reappeared and wanted to be part of my life. She sends me birthday cards and stuff - sometimes money, which is always a bonus - but we're just not...really...family."

"So they're really not like my parents at all."

"I guess not."

Raz scratched at the back of his head and yawned. "Well, at least we know we won't end up like that."

"Yeah, you're right," said Lili.

Then they both seemed to realize what they had said. Lili's hand drifted to her lips, stunned, and Raz looked down at the messy floor. Was he actually thinking like that? Was she actually thinking like that?

All too late, she tried to cover it up. "I mean..."

"Right, because..."

"Yeah."

They fell silent again, and stayed that way until the timer went off, announcing that the cake was ready.