Elphaba dove out of the way of the charging colossus, narrowly avoiding Boq as he plowed right through the free-standing kitchen counter. The wood splintered everywhere, and the granite table top shattered, sending chunks into the walls and floors, ruining the paint job wherever they hit. Boq stood there for a moment, like a sluggish animal, before turning menacingly to Elphaba. He towered over her cowering form, and she desperately looked around for an escape, but she had backed herself into a corner. Sam was shouting in the background, but Elphaba was fixated on the mad look in Boq's eyes, as he raised his massive arms above his head, ready to bring them down on the woman he saw as the bane of his existence.

Boq narrowed his eyes at Elphaba, lying prone and visibly frightened on the floor in front of him. "You… Wicked Witch," he whispered intensely, before bringing his arms down on top of her-- .

"No!"

-- And stopping so abruptly he almost fell forward himself. There, between the giant and the green girl, stood Glinda, arms poised above herself, shielding her head as she was using her body to shield her friend.

Boq lowered his arms, shocked. "Glinda, what are you…" He trailed off, remembering the two women's history, their friendship, and Glinda's tirade from before she disappeared from Oz. His posture relaxed and he tried approaching Glinda a different way. "Glinda, this woman ruined my life."

Glinda lowered her own arms, slowly, an angry expression marking her features. "I already explained to you what happened, you idiot." She stood her full height right in front of him, still making her almost three feet shorter than him, standing her ground nonetheless. "And even if she was the only person responsible for this," she banged on his chest, "do you really think that's grounds enough to kill her?!"

Boq craned his neck up, looking past Glinda to see the other woman in the room helping a shell-shocked Elphaba to her feet. He then looked back to Glinda. "What would you have me do? Just forgive her? After everything, all the pain she caused me," he tried pleading with her.

Glinda sighed and put her hands on her hips in a defiant gesture. "Don't be an idiot. Find out the whole story first, meaning her side of it."

"And then what," Boq asked, skeptically.

She walked away from him, towards her still shaken friend, shrugging back at Boq nonchalantly. "Shut up and take it like a Munchkin." She left Boq with his jaw hinged wide-open, and turned to inspect her friend. "Are you alright?"

Elphaba nodded. "I must say, I wasn't expecting such a violent reaction."

"I know my opinion is useless, as I, as usual, have no idea what is going on," Sam said, "but I think I oughta chop him up and sell him for spare parts for the money to FIX MY DAMN KITCHEN!!!" Samantha hurled the closest object available-- the remote-- at Boq for emphasis. Naturally, the impact against Boq's metal body caused the plastic remote to shatter into several hundred pieces.

She ran a slightly shaky hand over her face and looked over at Glinda comforting Elphaba. The green woman looked like she was alright now, having gotten over the Attack of the Giant Tin Morons. Sam then cast a look over the room, groaning at the destruction. She wondered how things could get any worse…

Then a knock sounded at the door.

Every head in the room turned, horrified to look at it; three people moved soundlessly, the fourth with the groan of metal rubbing on metal accentuating the feeling of horror-movie dread in the air.

Swallowing the lump in her throat, Sam stood to her feet. She pushed away her fears and strengthened her resolve, but the sound of a big tin soldier getting to his massive feet, wood, glass, and granite crunching-- no, being obliterated, underfoot… Well… Panic just had to set back in.

"Shit!" She exclaimed in a hushed tone. "All of you! Get into the bedroom! No one can see you! Well… Maybe Glinda, but the green woman and the living sculpture need to get out of sight." She scurried around the room, shooing the three Ozians out of view of the door. "On second thought, Glinda, you hide, too. I don't need to add more questions than I can handle."

As soon as the others were in the other room, and the door clicked closed, Sam raced back to the door, jumping over the couch and banging her knee on the coffee table on her way.

"Ah! Shit!" She rubbed her throbbing knee, but didn't slow her pace until she reached the front door. Forgetting the peephole, she immediately opened the door, albeit just a crack. There, in her slippers and robe, and all her various-droopy-body-parts glory, was Samantha's wrinkled and perpetually frowning landlady.

Immediately, Sam plastered a smile onto her face. "Mrs. Wilkins! What a," she forced the word out, "pleasant surprise!"

"What's going on up here?" the old woman croaked, her vocal cords gnarled from years of chain-smoking. "The whole building's shaking, and all the tenants are complaining about the noise."

"Uhhhhh… Noise?" Sam asked, lamely. For the live of her, or at least for the apartment of her, she couldn't think up anything to say that would put off her landlady's suspicions. "What… noise?"

Mrs. Wilkins stared at her flatly for a while, before letting out a breath of foul air. "You wanna let me in so I can take a look around?"

"No?" At the withering look she received, Sam sighed. "Alright, come on in." She swung the door open and let the old woman hobble on in. "Before you say anything, let me explain-- ."

"What happened here?"

"I-- uh-- a pigeon got in through the window and I kinda spazzed trying to get it to fly back out." Sam said, praying that the woman would buy it and take it easy on her for whatever reason.

There was a long silence, while Sam stood, cringing and not bearing to look at the woman, for fear of seeing her reaction.

"Why are all of your plates broken?"

Sam looked up, not expecting the calm question? "What-- ?" She looked up at the old woman who was currently disdainfully pushing glass and porcelain around the floor with her slippered foot. "What the hell-- ?"

The counter top was back in its original shape, perfect and without a scratch. There weren't even any stray splinters or chunks of granite counter. It was as if Boq had never gone crashing through it at all. Sam looked back at the bedroom door, where she saw her roommates peeking through a crack in the door; Elphaba with her eyes closed, a look of concentration on her face, and Glinda smiling madly, before frowning and pushing Boq's intruding head out of the doorway. When the Ozians ducked back into the room, Sam turned around to face Mrs.Wilkins, who in turn had just turned her attention back to Sam.

"You say a bird got in here?" She asked, suspiciously.

Sam nodded, eyes shifty. "… A big one."

"Well, you keep that damn window closed, then," the old woman said as she started hobbling to the door. "You broke you're doors there to the balcony. And the floor in the kitchen is scratched." She opened the door to leave, pausing a moment. "You know that means your security deposit is gone."

Before Sam could ask when she could expect her window to be fixed, her landlady left, shutting the door behind herself.

Sam sighed, locking the door before turning back around. She allowed herself a moment of resignation before she called over to her three housemates.

"You guys can come out now…"

As the three of them came back into the living room, Glinda couldn't help but mess up Elphaba's hair, affectionately. "See? You can use magic great when you concentrate!"

Boq's face took on a look of contemplation. "If I were to apologize, could you get me back to normal?"

Elphaba opened her mouth to speak, but as it often happens, Glinda interrupted her. "Well, now she probably could, but I still don't like you, so I forbid it!"

"You forbid it?" Elphaba asked. "How do you figure you can forbid me anything?"

"Oh, Elphie, hush," Glinda dismissed her with the wave if her hand.

Elphaba rolled her eyes at her overbearing friend before turning back to look at Boq. "Boq, rest assured I will try everything in my power to make amends and get you back to normal, but my powers have never been all that concrete, so I can't bring myself to make any promises." She offered a small smile. "But an apology for the various attempts on my life would be greatly appreciated, nonetheless."

Boq turned his head so as not to look her in the eyes. "I'll think about it," he mumbled.

"No, no!" Glinda shouted, stepping right up to him, the near four-foot height difference making her appear the Munchkin in the room, but doing nothing to mask her fierceness. "What you need to be thinking about, or more like talking about, is what in the world you're doing here, and why did we just see HORRIBLE MORRIBLE ON THE TELE-WHOSITZ?!"

Boq rubbed the back of his head, sliding his hand over the rivets keeping him together. "She's still alive? Wow. She must be getting close to a hundred years old….."

"She certainly looked it," Sam pointed out.

"Wait a clock tick," Elphaba said, trying to get everyone back on track. "How is she here? How are you here? Why did you come here and how did you both get here so far ahead of us, when Glinda saw you in Oz only just before we left."

"And also, why are you huge?" Glinda piped up.

"That's a lot of questions." Boq lowered himself to sit on the floor, his joints groaning loudly. "Well, first of all, I don't know how we got here so far ahead of you, but the reason I came here was because I…. Well, I was looking for you, Miss G-- uh, Glinda. The guards in the palace thought they sensed a magical presence or something, and I knew I wouldn't be able to find you on my own, so after a few days I was able to get down to the dungeons to have a word with Madame Morrible. She said that not only was there a disturbance in the palace the night you disappeared, but that she sensed, somewhere else on the Imaginary Continent, just outside of Oz, a distinct change in the weather. Someone had conjured a twister, and she said the only person she ever met with such formidable magic, other than herself, was the Wicked Witch. She convinced me that you were in danger, Glinda, so I sprung her out of jail, and she conjured us a twister of our own, so we could follow you wherever yours took you."

There was a moment of awed silence, the words trying to sink in, before Glinda looked back up to face Boq.

"I'm sorry, all of those words seemed to have jumbled together. What did you say?"

Elphaba sighed. "He got Morrible to take him here in an effort to follow us. But that still doesn't explain how he could've gotten here before us."

"Maybe your trip took longer because you guys traveled here from outside of Oz," Sam suggested, feeling kind of out of the loop. "Like, maybe you were just that much closer."

Elphaba mulled over the notion. "Maybe."

"But thirty years?" Boq asked. "That's a long time. It seems like you all would have noticed something about the time it took to get here."

"Well, we're obviously not going to figure it out right now," Glinda huffed from her seat on the couch. "So how did you get so big? None of us changed size from the trip."

"Well…." Boq looked sheepish, but Elphaba cut him off.

"Maybe it's a side-effect of already having had a spell cast on you," she mused.

"Actually-- " Boq tried again, only for Glinda to cut in.

"That's true; we haven't seen Fiyero yet, so he could be affected as well." Elphaba winced at Glinda's mention of her lover.

"Nah, there haven't been any sightings of giant, walking, talking, scarecrows on the news."

"Fiyero was the scarecro-- Waitaminit!" Boq shouted. "Let's at least try to get back on track, here!" After pausing a moment, to make sure no one was going to continue speaking, he began again. "I can tell you quite plainly how I came to be so much taller."

"Go on," Glinda said, seeming upset with him for raising his voice at her.

"When Morrible and I were in that twister, the force of the winds rattled my rivets something awful. And, when the winds stopped, my body crashed to the ground, while Morrible was able to conjure winds to slow her descent. When I landed, my body shattered into bits, and I tried asking for help, but Morrible just smirked and ignored me, leaving me to rust in the rain in what I figure was a junk heap. Well, rust I did, and after… I don't know, a few weeks, a man came and gathered up all of my pieces, and some more metal he found lying around, and he added it to my body to make a giant version of myself. He sold it to the Park District and they 'installed' me in the spot you guys found me; I've been there ever since." Boq sighed and let out a rueful chuckle. "How lucky am I that he put me back, mostly, into my actual shape?"

Glinda gave him a dirty look. "You'd be luckier if he made you into a better-looking version of yourself."

"Glinda!" Elphaba scolded her, seeing the hurt look on Boq's tin features. "You're not helping."

"I can't help it if he brings out the worst in me," Glinda haughtily defended herself.

"I think men in general bring out the worst in you," Elphaba shot back, thinking of Fiyero and causing Glinda to huff in indignation.

As the two friends argued, an old can of worms having been opened up again, Sam turned to Boq with a firm expression. "They can argue, but I'd like to know what's going on. I mean, I'm pretty in-the-dark about all of this magical business, and we have so many problems to deal with I say the sooner we deal with them, the better."

Boq nodded his head. "I agree. But I'm afraid I've already told you all I know." He sighed. "I only wish I could do more to help….."

"Huhn. Well, if we get into a situation that calls for a giant metal man to wreak havoc on the city, I'll let you know." Sam sighed and rubbed a hand on the back of her neck before loudly cracking it. "Okay. Well, the only thing I can think to do would be to go to the Field Museum and corner the crone, and demand some answers."

"Right!" Glinda clapped her hands together once in anticipation. "As much as I hate museums, and really anything educational, let's get going!"

"Uhhhh, Glinda?" Sam asked gently, so as not to burst Glinda's bubble and cause a sort of massive psychological/metaphorical decompression, "We're going to have to wait until morning. The museum has an annoying tendency of closing at night."

Glinda humphed, but then left for the bedroom without another word, leaving Sam to wonder if she'd ever get to sleep in her own bed again, at least, so long as Glinda was staying with her.

A/N: Whoa! Long time, no update! Sorry about that, really, but real life sucks, and the next few chapters have been difficult to write. The story's going to start getting more intense, and the characters more active. So, and I know I keep saying this, but I'm really trying, updates should be up sooner than usual, and I just wanna wish Happy Holidays to everyone who celebrates one! Or, if you don't celebrate anything… Uh… Happy Winter! Hooray!

…..

And what better gift to give than that of loving (or hating) thoughts?

Review?