Nodding to himself, Roy closed his day planner, then double checked the calendar on his phone. Nothing scheduled for the afternoon that couldn't be put off for a couple of hours. Picking the phone up he dialed a familiar number. "Hi, Danny," he said when the other end picked up.
"Hello, Roy. I assume you want to arrange a time for you and your sister's family to come over?" Danny Hebert replied.
"I do. Is it still possible for this afternoon?"
"Yes, certainly, it's fine then. I'll double check which of the Family will be available, but I know Saurial will be, and Metis is very likely too. Ianthe may be around later. I'd expect Raptaur will turn up. I've already mentioned Dinah to them and they were interested to meet her." He sounded pleased and in a good mood.
"Great. That's wonderful, Danny, please pass on my thanks. It means a lot to the girl, she's been talking about wanting to meet them for weeks now."
"It's really not any sort of problem, trust me," the DWU man replied with a chuckle in his voice. "They like meeting new people, both from a PR standpoint and from a personal interest one, so it's no trouble. Around four this afternoon?"
"That will work, thanks." Roy made a note on his pad. "I'll call Cheryl now to let her know."
"Great. We'll look forward to seeing you all then."
"All right. See you soon, Danny."
"Later, Roy." Danny hung up, as did Roy, then he picked the phone up again and dialed another number.
"Hi, Sis. We're on for this afternoon at the DWU."
"Oh, wonderful, Roy, that's fantastic. Dinah will be extremely happy about that. She was talking about it all the way home last night and from the moment she got up this morning." His sister laughed. "She's looking forward to it like it was Christmas all over again."
He grinned. "I can imagine. OK, I'll meet you there, four PM. Just say you're there to see Danny Hebert and the guards will let you in."
"All right, Roy. Thank you very much for setting this up."
"Hey, I love my niece and I'm happy to help, although all I did was make a phone call," he told her.
"Still, it's something she'll be pleased about, so well done."
"I'd better get back to work, I have to call a few other people, but I'm looking forward to it. Oh, bring your camera, I expect you'll get some interesting photos out of it."
"I can imagine," she chortled. "I'll put it on charge now. Bye, Roy."
"See you, Cheryl." Once again he hung up, feeling satisfied. Shortly he was involved in city hall work, humming under his breath as he read yet another report and made annotations in the margins with a pen.
"We're nearly ready for the first shipment of scrap," Kurt said as he turned to Danny, both men watching the next rail car get moved into position under the crane. There was a train of forty-three cars already coupled together waiting on the siding, all full of cut up tanker and warehouse support material, separated into ferrous, aluminum, and other non-ferrous groups. The small engine that very slowly tugged the entire lot around as the train grew was idling quietly at the end of the track next to the switch point, as another one pushed the new empty car down the main line at a walking pace.
"It's looking very good," Danny replied. "If anything we're ahead of schedule on this part."
"Which is useful, it allows us some wiggle room when things go wrong later," Kurt pointed out. Danny nodded, knowing that some sort of problem was almost inevitable, even if it was only something trivial and mechanical. It would still take time to sort out and only a fool never assumed that things would break or otherwise screw up.
"I've gone over all the remaining track and switch gear with a crew, we've identified a couple of minor issues and some more places that about fifty yards of track should be replaced, just in case, because it's looking chewed up. Nothing fatal but it's going to fail eventually so we might as well do it now before we need it," his old friend continued. "The train yard itself is in surprisingly good condition. A lot of the electrical gear was stolen over the years, but the track and other fixtures and fittings was too much effort for them to deal with, I'd guess, and not worth all that much anyway. We're putting in new equipment and bringing everything up to current code, that will be done within two weeks at the outside. Again, we don't need most of the capacity yet but we will do soon enough at this rate."
"OK. That sounds good. Let me have the paperwork as soon as you can, please. I'll sign off on any overtime required, we want to get the infrastructure up and running as fast as we can do it safely."
"Will do." Kurt made a few notes on a pad he pulled out of his top pocket, then put it away again. "We're definitely going to need more people on the job soon, I'm running out of trained engineers with railroad experience. I've asked around and found about a dozen men so far who are looking for work, have the relevant experience, and seem like they'd fit in. I've also got feelers out on some more. Half a dozen ex-truckers, some old military guys with a lot of mechanical support skills, that sort of thing."
"Great." Danny smiled. "Sounds like our sort of people. We'll need some young ones as well, to train them up for some of the specialist jobs, but we'll start with people who won't need their hands held to begin with. Give their details to Lisa, she'll arrange the interviews."
"Got it." His friend turned to look at him for a second. "Smart girl, that one. She's very good at reading people." He sounded faintly accusatory. "Considering how young she is and all."
Danny smiled again, amused. "Oh, yes, very good indeed. I've come to rely on her instincts remarkably fast. We're lucky to have her."
"Hmm." Kurt regarded him suspiciously, then shrugged. "True enough. Her friends are interesting too. That lad Brian is a damn hard worker and respectful with it. I like him."
"Most people seem to," Danny agreed. "I do too. He's going to do well for himself, whether he stays here or not. Smart kid."
"Yes." They watched the engine chug away, having finished delivering the new car, which was already receiving the first load of cut up ship. The crash and clatter of steel dropping into the car from the electromagnet on the crane was deafening even two hundred yards away. "Things sure have changed around here." Kurt seemed pleased about it. "Brenda says hello, by the way. She's getting a lot better, although she still has a limp. Lacy thinks she'll be able to come back to full time work in a week or so."
"That's good to hear," Danny responded. "Give her my best, please." He looked at his watch. "I have to make a couple of phone calls, so I'll leave you to it."
"I'll tell her. See you later, Danny." Kurt flicked a wave at his friend, then raised his radio to his mouth, getting back to work. Walking back to the office Danny wondered whether he should warn Lisa about Taylor's new trick. After a moment, he smirked and shook his head. It would be much funnier to see her expression...
Taylor finished working the calculation on the board in her assignment book, showing her method in neat figures. It had taken her longer to write it down than to come up with the correct answer. Glancing at the clock she saw that there was still twenty minutes left on the math test, and as usual she was the first one finished by a wide margin. The teacher noticed her look up and raised his eyebrows. She nodded, causing him to smile a bit, then go back to his own work.
'Well, that means I don't have anything to do for a while until everyone else is done,' she remarked to her demonic friend. Pulling out a chemistry textbook she opened to her marked place, knowing that the teachers were fine with her quietly doing other work when she finished math early. 'May as well do this.'
"Or..." The Varga sounded sly in her mind.
'Or?' she queried, curious.
"Or we could do some other experimentation," he chuckled. "We have, after all, unlocked a new skill. We should find out what we can do with it."
'Here?' she asked, surprised.
"Why not?" he replied happily. "We can use the cloaking spell perfectly well, no one will notice anything."
'Good point,' she mused. 'Very good point.' After a couple of seconds, she got her own sly grin, which she suppressed with an effort of will. No reason to freak out the rest of the class. 'And I have an idea...'
"Go on," he urged, interested.
She told him what she'd thought about doing, which made both of them laugh quite a lot, then concentrate.
Rather bored, Amy took notes as the temporary history teacher droned on about the American Revolution, with regard to the role Brockton Bay had played in it, which wasn't nearly as critical as Boston had. She thought that in all honesty Danny would probably teach this class better, he knew a lot more about the history of the city than the man standing at the front of the class talking in a monotone, and engaged with his audience a lot more effectively too. Still, she had to sit here for an hour and write things down every now and then, that was the price the adults wanted to leave the students alone for the rest of the time.
She sighed very quietly, wishing he'd just talk like he wasn't already asleep or something, or crack a joke, or anything to liven things up. Half the class was at serious risk of dropping off, and they'd already had one student lay his head on the desk and moan in despair.
'God, I hope Mrs Smith gets back soon,' she thought, putting her pen down and resting her chin on her hands. 'This guy is horrible.' Glancing at her sister, who was sitting a couple of desks away with Dean on her other side, she noticed that the blonde had her eyes closed and was barely awake.
Dean noticed the same thing and poked her in the ribs, causing Vicky to yip faintly and snap awake, looking around wildly. Several students snickered, making her flush a little and the teacher pause, inspect them, then go back to his lecture.
Amy smiled to herself, then sighed once more. This was torture. Surely the Geneva Convention had something to say about history teachers and verbal warfare?
She was on the verge of wondering whether he'd Triggered with some sort of audio-based soporific ability when she spotted something outside the window which made her gape.
'What the...'
The brunette girl glared at her best friend, who for some reason was currently in the form of Raptaur, peering in through the window with both hands cupped around her eyes, her scaly face pressed against the glass. Taylor spotted her, grinned, and waved wildly.
Looking around in worry, Amy frowned when not a single other person in the room seemed to notice anything amiss. Dean was actually idly looking out that window, which faced out over the sports ground, chewing on the end of a pencil. He seemed to look right through the very obvious huge reptilian form, which was now performing some sort of vigorous semaphore that Amy couldn't make heads or tails of.
"You idiot, what are you doing?," she hissed under her breath, very quietly, while scowling at her friend. Taylor had obviously lost it completely, and was presumably using the Assassin's Cloak technique to hide her presence.
The large nearly black form smirked at her, made a couple more hand signs, then looked up, before jumping and vanishing. Amy watched, puzzled. After a couple of seconds, she groaned when Raptaur's head came into view again, this time upside down and slowly lowering into place from above the window. She was apparently now clinging to the outside of the school.
'Oh, for fuck's sake, what the hell are you doing?' she thought with annoyance. Her friend seemed to be having far too much fun.
An inverted reptilian grin was the only answer, then the head disappeared again. She sighed, shaking her own head. That girl was a menace and needed a stern talking to.
Sitting up straight she made a couple more notes, scratched out a sentence from the previous one, put her pen down, looked up at the window, and made everyone in the room jump then stare at her when she loudly squawked in shock.
"Is there a problem, Miss Dallon?" their substitute teacher said, looking more than a little surprised.
Not taking her eyes from the very large, very black, and very smug dragon that had its entire head pushed through the now-open window and was resting it on the sill, she replied, "No. Sorry. Cramp."
There was a rustle of laughter from her classmates, none of whom were any the wiser. Dean, who was less than four feet from the scaly reptilian pain in the ass, looked at her with a frown, undoubtedly picking up on the emotions she was hiding behind the blankest face much practice would allow. He looked around the room, then back to her, something she noticed out of her peripheral vision but paid little attention to.
'Go away, you lunatic!' Amy thought at her friend. The dragon-form Taylor winked, stuck out a long forked tongue and tickled Dean's ear with it, causing Amy's eyes to widen and Dean to twitch, then grinned again and pulled her head back. A large hand came up and gently pulled the window down. Moments later the view of the slowly greening sports field was entirely back to normal.
Gradually relaxing as nothing else happened, the healer tried to work out what the fuck had just occurred. Taylor was clearly being weird again, not that that narrowed things down all that much. She was weird at the best of times. But why was she pranking the class, especially when none of them other than Amy noticed?
After some thought, she realized a number of things:
Taylor was nuts.
This must be connected to her arriving on Raptaur-back that morning.
She wasn't pranking the class, she was pranking Amy.
Taylor was going to regret this…
Growling almost inaudibly under her breath, the girl tried to work out exactly how she was going to make a damn near indestructible half-demon pay. And wondering how the fuck she could be in two places at the same time, since she was certain that if she checked, her friend wouldn't have moved from whatever class she was currently in as far as anyone else was concerned.
Doing her utmost not to giggle out loud, Taylor sat quietly in Math, for all external appearances reading a textbook, her head propped on one arm and the other one turning pages. Inside her mind the Varga was rolling around guffawing.
"Her expression," he laughed. "That was amazing. We need to do another one."
'OK,' she snickered. 'How about this?' Forming the spacial link in the corridor next to Amy's room, which was on the other side of the school, Taylor manifested the second part of their shared body, this one as Saurial. She looked around, allowing the Varga to take control of her first body for the moment as they'd done before, since she was still having some issues with making both of them do completely different things. It was something that was quite rapidly becoming less trouble but would certainly take a lot of practice to be completely normal.
Other than that, it was surprisingly effortless to essentially be in two places at once. She could see and hear everything going on in her math class and could step in instantly if required, and at the same time run around as Saurial with as much ease. Walking over to the door to Amy's class, fully cloaked from everyone, she peered through the window, then eased the door open and slipped inside.
Going over to stand behind her friend, she watched her for a few seconds. Amy was clearly both bored witless, and very confused at what they'd done outside the room just a little while ago. Glancing about she saw that Dean was giving the brunette odd looks every now and then but otherwise seemed fine. The cloak blocked her emotional output, she knew that from previous experimentation, so he was as unaware of her presence as the rest of them.
Reaching out, she flicked Amy's pen with a claw, which made it roll off the desk onto the floor. Amy looked down at the quiet click, then bent down and retrieved it.
Giving it a moment, Taylor repeated the action. Amy sighed and retrieved the wayward writing implement again, putting it firmly down on her notebook. She glared at it for a second then went back to listening to the teacher. Taylor smirked, and once more dislodged the pen.
This went on three more times before Amy started looking very annoyed. Relenting, Taylor stopped, then thought for a moment. As an idea struck her, she picked the pen up and wrote a note under Amy's handwriting, the girl completely oblivious, put the pen back, and walked down to the front of the room.
Sighing again, nearly loudly enough for others to overhear, Amy looked over at the clock. This lesson was dragging on interminably, she'd just about be prepared to swear she'd been listening to this guy for an hour already yet the clock showed that only twenty minutes had passed. 'Damn it, I'm going to pass out from boredom soon,' she thought. It was almost enough to make her want Taylor to come back.
Almost.
She looked around at her classmates, seeing that her sister was nodding off once more, three more people had succumbed to the relentless drone, and even Dean was starting to blink more and more slowly. Wondering if the teacher was actually trying to put them all to sleep, in which case full credit was deserved, she grabbed her pen to start doodling in a desperate attempt to stave off insanity.
As she looked down at her notebook, she froze.
'This is really boring, isn't it?' read a line of text she definitely hadn't written. It wasn't in her handwriting, but she recognized whose it was.
'Is he always this bad?' the next line read.
'Would you like to play a game?' was below that.
Amy ground her teeth together. How…? When…?
God, Taylor was infuriating at times. The worst part being, Amy was now more envious than anything else. When she heard a throat being cleared, she looked up, feeling a sense of unreality when she spotted Saurial standing on the other side of the desk from the teacher, smirking at her in an amused fashion. Taylor's smallest alter-ego nodded to her, then picked up a piece of chalk and turned to the board behind her.
Amy suppressed a mix of a groan and a giggle as her friend quickly drew the classic 'Tic-Tac-Toe' game on the board. "I'll go first." She put an X in one corner, then looked back to Amy, grinning widely. "Stop me when I point to the right place." Running the tip of a claw over the board, she produced a sound that made Amy pale. "Oops. Sorry."
She didn't look sorry.
The healer glared at her, glanced at the teacher who was completely ignoring the scaly menace only six feet to his left, then nodded slightly when Taylor's finger indicated the right place, the middle. Her friend put a O there, then stepped back and studied the board carefully. "Ah. Cunning. This is already shaping up to be a game of legendary status." After a moment, she put an X below her first one.
Like this, they played the game through, obviously drawing since Tic-Tac-Toe isn't difficult to not lose. By the end of it, Amy was trying not to laugh out loud since the commentary from her friend was hysterically funny. It made the entire thing, which could have been completed in seconds, last over ten minutes.
Finally finished, Taylor glanced at the clock. Putting the chalk down, she erased the game, then bowed to Amy. "Mission accomplished. Saurial out."
With that she vanished.
Amy stared, then looked around, since her friend had apparently gone back under the cloaking spell, but couldn't see anything out of place. Shaking her head a little at the way everyone else was entirely oblivious of the whole bizarre event, she grinned to herself. Perhaps Taylor would be allowed to live this time.
It was only when the class was packing up that she spotted the neat little grinning lizard face that had appeared in the corner of the chalk board. Vicky was staring suspiciously at it, her eyes narrowed in thought. After a moment, her sister looked at her, then at Dean, then very carefully around the room, before quickly leaving.
Snickering, Amy followed, hoping that the regular teacher would be available the next time they had History. And even more curious about how Taylor was doing this.
On the other side of the school, Taylor chuckled happily, trying to decide how else to capitalize on her new talent. It seemed to have even more scope for deriving amusement than either she or the Varga had initially expected.
And she was really looking forward to seeing what Lisa thought of it. She had some plans for that first meeting...
Sitting down at the table, Amy put her tray in front of her, before unloading the contents. She picked up her can of soda, opened it, took a sip, then replaced it on the tray. With deliberate calmness she turned to Taylor who was sitting next to her, watching, and wearing a calm expression under which she could detect a definite smirk.
"How?" she asked quietly, but with force. "How the fuck?"
Taylor tapped the side of her nose. "It is… a secret."
Amy clenched her fists, then slowly relaxed them. "I will hurt you," she warned.
"No, you won't," her friend chuckled.
"Don't bet on it," the Dallon sister muttered, grabbing her fork and starting to eat. Their friends arrived moments later, all sitting down and doing much the same. During the next half hour, as they did the usual chatting and discussing lessons and the state of the world in general, Amy kept a close eye on Taylor, who merely ate in a completely innocent manner and occasionally gave her an amused look out of the corner of her eye.
Roughly half-way through the lunch hour, Dennis suddenly yelped. "Hey!" he said indignantly. "Who did that?"
"What?" Carlos said, as Amy and the others turned to look at the other table.
"Someone took a bite out of my spare burger," the red-head complained, looking around at his friends, all of whom seemed puzzled. "Look." He held up the offending item of food, showing that a large part was missing. Amy inspected it carefully.
Then she turned to look hard at Taylor, who was also watching the minor drama.
Her friend gave her a sideways look. "Problem?" she asked.
Amy sighed.
"Stop that," she whispered.
"What?"
"Who ate my pie?" a voice said with annoyance from behind them.
"That."
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Taylor replied mildly, picking up the apple that was the only thing left on her tray and biting into it.
"I still had half that sandwich left, damn it!" Amy looked over her shoulder at one of the cheerleaders who was a friend of her sister, the black-haired girl staring around her with an aggrieved expression. "Who took it?"
Dennis yelped again. "Now my soda is gone." He glared around the crowded room, fixing a boy a couple of tables away with a hard look. "Mike, this feels like one of your practical jokes. How did you do it?"
"Nothing to do with me," the accused boy retorted. "Pretty cool trick, though."
The red-headed boy looked very suspicious, not helped by the broad grin the person he'd called out to was now wearing. "Yeah, sure it wasn't you. You do realize that I'm going to get you back, right?"
"Bring it on, my friend," the other boy chuckled. "Bring it on."
"Oh, god," Amy moaned as she listened to what she just knew was the opening salvo of a prank war that would live on in infamy, possibly ending up as bad as the Great Coleslaw Explosion. She bowed her head and held it in her hands. "I hate you sometimes."
Taylor consolingly patted her on the shoulder. In fact, somehow she managed to pat her on both shoulders at the same time, while still holding the apple in her right hand. Amy groaned.
There was something deeply wrong with her friend. This had never been so apparent.
The others looked at the healer, then Taylor, who shrugged. "No idea, guys. I guess she's just having one of those days."
Mandy nodded wisely. "That's definitely a thing. Cheer up, Amy, it might never happen."
"It already did," she muttered through her hands, which were rubbing her face. "Believe me, it already did."
She could hardly wait for school to end, so she could go the DWU and shout at Taylor for a while. The girl clearly deserved it.
Very, very much.
Vicky carefully looked around the room again. Leaving aside Dennis, who was now huddled with Chris plotting something, both of them casting dark glances at Mike Gregson, the other major practical joker at Arcadia, nothing seemed amiss. Amy was talking quietly to Taylor, who seemed amused about something, Mandy was giggling with Lucy, both of them chatting to Rich, and Eric was just listening. At her table, Dean was watching his two friends with the expression of someone who knows chaos is approaching and can't decide whether to run or join in, while Carlos was deliberately ignoring all of them and reading a magazine.
Something odder than normal was going on, she was sure of that. But she couldn't figure out who or what was behind it, or even put her finger on quite what was actually happening.
That appalling history class had dragged on and on and on and on, to the point she'd nearly lost the will to live, and she definitely couldn't even remember half of it. Probably because her brain had shut down in self-defense.
But… At the end, where had that little drawing of a lizard come from?
She was sure it hadn't been there at the beginning, she hadn't seen anyone draw it during the lesson, which admittedly wasn't something she'd swear to, and she couldn't see why the teacher would do it. He was clearly just trying to rack up a body count by talking them to death, which would probably take his full concentration.
The blonde girl watched Taylor carefully. The other girl was smiling, her normal cheerful self, and seemed to find whatever Amy was grumbling about very amusing based on her expression. As always, nothing looked out of place.
However, the way she'd arrived that morning was… odd. Sure, Amy had ridden Raptaur around the place several times, and all the people at that table had done the same at one point, but Vicky hadn't heard that Taylor had ever done it. Normally, as far as she was aware, she either took the bus or jogged in from home, which if nothing else showed she was in good shape. Turning up on lizard-back was a bit weird.
After a little more thought, she shrugged to herself. She was well aware that Taylor knew the Family, so it wasn't that odd. Probably nothing to worry about.
So why did she have a tingling feeling on the back of her neck like she was being watched?
She shivered a little and leaned closer to Dean. She really needed to stop spending her evenings reading weird conspiracy theories on the web. It wasn't good for her state of mind.
Turning her head, Taylor regarded her friend, who was staring fixedly at her. Again.
"Light's green," she helpfully pointed out.
Amy snorted, looking back to the front and putting the truck in drive, then accelerating with slightly more vigor than required. "You are..." She shook her head. "I have no words for what you are."
"Helpful? Friendly? Good at math? Fun to be with?" Taylor grinned. "Stop me when I get there."
"How did you do that?"
"Do what?" She looked innocently at her friend. They pulled up at the next traffic light. Both of them turned their heads to watch the pedestrians cross, Amy making a growling sound deep in her chest when Saurial, who was in the middle of the group of people passing the front of the truck, gave them a cheery wave and exited scene right.
There was a frigid silence as her friend drove away. Taylor was desperately trying not to fall about laughing.
"At times, you know, I ask myself why the hell I ever wanted a friend in the first place," Amy muttered a couple of minutes later. "Times like this."
She looked to the left as Raptaur galloped past, stuck her hand out to indicate a left turn, and vanished up a side street. Taylor swallowed another giggle and fixed a serious expression on her face. "Sorry, I don't understand you. Are you saying that you'd prefer to be depressed and angsty?"
There was a grating sound from beside her, apparently coming from Amy's mouth. "That's not good for your teeth, you know," she added pleasantly.
Raptaur passed them again, going the other way and waving as she did so.
Amy growled again. "HOW?" she yelled. "YOU INSANE SCALY MENACE! HOW IN GOD'S NAME ARE YOU DOING THAT?"
Unable to hold in her laughter any more, Taylor lost it completely and heaved with hilarity. Amy stared at her, sighed, and proceeded to ignore her in a dignified fashion until she finally ran down. "Sorry, but this has been one of the funniest days I've ever had," she giggled, wiping her eyes. "So funny."
"Just tell me how you're doing it?" Amy pleaded, now sounding desperately curious more than anything.
"We really should stop tormenting our poor friend, Brain," the Varga said from the rear seat.
"GAHHH!" Amy screamed, looking over her shoulder in shock. Taylor whipped a hand out and grabbed the steering wheel, keeping them straight. Luckily she'd anticipated that reaction and waited until they were on one of the access roads to the docks which had no other traffic.
Slamming the brakes on, Amy stared at Saurial, behind her, then Taylor, beside her. Eventually, after looking back and forth a dozen times, she sagged. "I give up. Demons."
Both of them grinned. "Good, isn't it?"
"It's impossible, is what it is. Give. How are you doing… that." Amy weakly flapped a hand at the lizard girl in the rear seat.
"By the misapplication of some cunning spacial manipulations," Taylor said. Her friend stared at her. "Hint, only one body, but two minds."
The other girl gaped, then visibly thought very hard indeed. After close to a minute, her eyes widened, and she looked back at the Varga-controlled Saurial body, then at Taylor again. "Oh, my god. You're using a spacial fold to put one part of your body there and the other part here, then making each part a complete individual, right?"
"Yep." Taylor nodded in agreement, very pleased that Amy had worked it out from the clue. "It's something I've been thinking about for nearly two weeks. It was a present for Varga."
"To overcome the limitations of the Varga bargain." Amy shook her head in wonder. "Fucking amazing. How did you work that out?"
"It was a logical outgrowth of the fractional dimensional techniques, combined with watching what Vista was doing," she explained. "There are a number of limitations, of course, but even so it's got a lot of interesting applications. Practical jokes only being part of that, although a very important part." She grinned when Amy shook her head in resignation.
"I hope the little game in your class helped that incredibly boring lesson pass faster," she added.
Her friend suddenly grinned back. "It did, actually. Although I was really confused the entire time." Amy laughed manically for a moment. "God, if Dean had suddenly noticed your fucking enormous head only feet away, he'd have had a heart attack."
Both of them snickered at the comment. "I don't want to do that, I have to admit I quite like him," Taylor replied. "Like you said, he's one of the good guys. I guess we're probably going to have to talk to him again at some point, before he just gives up on the world and becomes a hermit because everything has stopped making sense."
"The poor boy does seem to be having difficulty with the Family again," the Varga put in. "I have no idea what explanation we can use this time, though. It will need some careful thought."
"Yes, I know, but we owe it to him," Taylor agreed.
Amy nodded. She suddenly chuckled again. "Oh, god, please tell me you're going to prank Lisa," she exclaimed, looking like she was going to start laughing again. "And Randall and Kevin."
"I have some ideas for them, yes," Taylor smirked. "But I'm open to suggestions."
Taking her foot off the brake, Amy resumed driving. "Oh, do I have some suggestions," she giggled.
They spent the rest of the drive plotting and laughing.