Note to The One Who Is Not Reading This:

Destroying unjustly obtained spacefront property is a GREAT way to "END" someone! ;D

Note to somebody who IS reading this:

Maybe you ought to read the rest of the story before you go into a fanboy/girl rage, k? (I'm a fangirl myself, so, well, you know how that goes ;)

I check Iggy's pulse and open his eyelids to determine whether or not he is indeed asleep.

He is - DEEPLY so. The Zarcolex knocked him three stages down through the murkiest depths of slumber.

Good.

I, on the other hand, shall engage in no such inactivities. I don't sleep but once a week, twice at the very most, anyway. And by my standards, I am still well-rested from my own experience with Zarcolex.

The thought of throwing Iggy off a cliff or into a deep body of water suddenly flashes through my mind, but I shake it away and tenderly tuck him into his Norwegian-made bed. I do, after all, intend on winning this the fair way, even if such concepts are yet beyond him. I NEED to find out which of the two of us is greater...

Did I just consider killing my brother? Well, my half-brother, but still...

Have I become hooked from the high I had gotten from murdering Egglantine? I have heard that the murder addiction that affects many serial killers is similarly potent to drug addiction...

Overwhelmed by such thoughts, I breathe tensely as I exit the dorm room.

"I... AM NOT... A PSYCHOPATH!"

I slam the door shut at that last word.

Indeed, I had good reason to kill Eggy. She is, after all... evil, I am sure of it.

Or maybe I am just paranoid...

NEIN! I am NOT paranoid! Nor am I schizophrenic, for I do not hear voices in my head... well, they don't sound like voices anyway... they sound like thoughts...

I... Ich brauche mehr Kaffee!

So I get myself another double-espresso mocha to buzz the thoughts away, and I begin to fix what Iggy had wrecked- I am SURE it was him, this damage is just the type of damage that only HE would do!

Well, maybe I am not so sure about what he would or wouldn't do anymore, but the teethmarks on some of the wires are very telling.

Indeed... only Iggy is capable of this...

He made some sort of sick twisted abstract puzzle out of the machine parts. It is as though he merely wanted to keep me preoccupied...

Preoccupied... Iggy. Nutty, random Iggy, with the subtlety to play such games with me? Nein, Iggy, for all his brilliance, does not have quite that degree of mental sophistication. And even if he does, he would be fool to play such games with me, Prince Ludwig von Koopa, MASTER of such games. His checkmate was, after all, due to the bombshell that I wish Princess Lavender had waited to drop upon me.

Perhaps it's about time I play a little game of my own...

Since I am not fully aware of all that is going on, I must work with what I DO know, taking into full consideration every factor that I know is unknown. Being, among many other things, a quantum physicist, I should be quite adept at that. Just working with Iggy lately has been practice at working with the unknown...

Yes, Eggs certainly DID know about the glasses, for I had not mentioned anything about the swirls to her, and yet her dying words were "the swirly glasses... are a party favor".

Which makes it more than possible that her father knows about them.

Such thoughts flicker through my head as I deftly reattach all of the machine parts, finishing well before Iggy had intended for me to. I hope.

Hopefully he hadn't counted on the remote mind-control technology I had come up with and installed during the time it had taken for me to repair the machine.

If that does not impress the judges, then Iggy's faulty synaptic reorganization technology certainly won't. But I do not need to demonstrate this feature to them in order to impress them enough to win the prize. Nor do I want to.

The time of judgment has come. At last. After so many interruptions, I shall FINALLY be declared the winner! I effervesce with giggles, being positively giddy from that thought, and also from caffeine psychosis.

First I must offer Iggy a coffee. A large, black, oversweetened drip brew infused with a triple helping of espresso and a couple of ground Excedrin tablets. Which he will accept, knowing how much he enjoys the effects of coffee...

"No thank you!" Iggy turns away and giggles to himself.

"What? But you LOVE coffee! I even dissolved sugar in it to the point of saturation, just the way you like it!"

Grr... am I going to have to, somehow, hide this inside a barbarian cream doughnut?

"Yes, you will drink it... and you will love it... it's espresso!"

I grab Iggy by the neck, and he opens his mouth, sticks his tongue out and says "aah". I pour the coffee down his throat, which, thankfully for him, had taken long enough to supersaturate with sugar that it had cooled down enough not to scald his esophagus.

"Mmm... coffee!" Iggy takes the cup and licks the unsaturated clumps of sugar out of the bottom.

I smirk at his exuberant satisfaction. "Best coffee you've ever had, huh? Just wait until you try Viennese coffee."

Secondly, I must ask a favor of the Princess. I nervously pace over to where Lavender is standing and clear my throat to alert her to my presence.

"Luddy? Are you OK?"

"For the moment, yes. I..." No, I couldn't ask of her such a favor. Putting an innocent in danger, and one who would do just about anything in her power to protect me at that...

"You wish to ask a favor, am I correct?"

Lavender's wide, shining eyes blink innocuously through her clearly polished glasses. There is no need to ask, for she already has her eye out for me.

"Uh, never mind... wait... keep a safe distance from Iggy, all right?"

Lavender giggles. "I am not worried about Iggy."

But I am worried about her... she might just snap... no, not during the judging she won't...

While the judges begin their judging with Gadd's project, Iggy looses his caffeine energy by spinning around in a circle while shaking his arms and yodeling. Taking care to avoid being hit, I prod him on the back of his neck, and he tips over, falling flat on his stomach.

Iggy pushes himself up with a bounce, and in a heartbeat he is face-to-face with me, ogling my eyes, his fingers trembling.

"GLASSES!"

I grab Iggy's wrists, which he struggles vigorously to wrest away.

"You promised I can have glasses during judging!"

"Not right now, the judging is not over yet..."

I have to paw Iggy's paws down repeatedly, like in a game of hot potato. Iggy then tenses to leap at me...

"Iggy, I do not think that you want to start a fight with me. If you do, you will be disqualified. And possibly sent on vacation again..."

Iggy's eyes light up at the thought of starting a fight, but then furrow at the thought of being disqualified and or hospitalized. "Fine, then. Have it that way."

Iggy walks back toward his own project. He stops, hunches over, and snickers, as though he is deviously rubbing his hands together, or worse...

"Ahahahaha... AHAHAHAHAHAHA HAH!"

"All right! Here, you can have the verdammt glasses!"

I close my eyes before removing the glasses and toss them. Iggy perks up when he feels them ping off of his shell and jumps in glee, throwing his own glasses off before putting mine on.

I did not expect him to do that. Another beneficial side effect of the caffeine, perhaps. I had been prepared to give the entire presentation with my eyes shut had I not been able to nonviolently procure glasses. I lock onto the position of those glasses, close my eyes and crawl toward it.

A piercing shriek rattles my shell. Lavender! Did Iggy hurt her?

I stand up and open my eyes. Lavender appears not to be harmed in any way that requires urgent medical attention. But her glasses... her ordinary pink-framed glasses...

I knew this was going to happen!