Over the Hedge 2 (OTH2): Family of We Chapter 8: Paper Beats Rock, an over the hedge fanfic

Note: I'm introducing a brief, narrated introduction at the beginning of each chapter. It may not be necessary, but I'm sure you'll find it convenient.

(FF doesn't have the little illustrations that go with the intros. Seriously, if you're reading on FF and not Deviantart or AO3, you're gonna be missing out on some stuff for some of these chapters.)

(DA is the best - It is where I'm mainly writing this)

XXX

Y'know what, I'm done apologizing for the word count (but P.S. I'm sorry). On top of scene and sub-scene breaks, I'm even separating chapters into acts because some chapters like this are so big they just need it. I love making each chapter a story of its own.

But also know that I AM trying to cut down on word counts by paraphrasing lesser clips without compromising the style of storytelling. Creating the most amount of Over the Hedge content possible is still my number one goal.

Now you may ask: "Why not just separate it into different chapters?" Because otherwise there'd probably be 50 in this episode alone. Yeah. But every scene is like its own chapter, organized into groups by ACTUAL chapter. THAT'S how you should read this.

Ep. 1, Chapter 4: Paper Beats Rock (~31k words)

"Let me tell you a story about the calm after the storm. Last week the Hedgies spent their quarter of the month flinging jello cakes at one another, and for what? Oh would you look at that… nothing! Now their time to quell the argument has reduced to a smidgeon. Team RPS looks to the forest. But as time goes TICK-TICK-TICK… Heather finds the family may just be the key to the lock, on the contrary! Hoot hoot!"

ACT I: Yep, There Are Acts Now

"Hey RJ, I gotta ask, like, what's it gonna be like when winter comes? Are you gonna… hibernate with us or something? That sounds so... not right."

"Be real, Verne's the only one who actually hibernates, right? Why sleep with him when we've got 3 months to make some plays, huh?! And best part, we don't have to tell 'em a thing in the spring. Got it?"

"Wait, you don't mean- If he finds out- Without him, wouldn't that be a little, y'know…?"

"Aw c'mon kid, ya got me now! What more do ya neeeed?"

"Stop calling me 'kid'. You hardly look older than Hammy, jeez. Trust me, we gotta be like, 4 years tops, I think."

...

In some remote location in the forest, RJ plants his golf club into the ground. "Exhibit A: Location."

Heather and Hammy topple over when they roll up with the big flipchart of RJ's stupidity diagram. Only now overwritten by a simple mapping of the forest, flooded by the X's of their previous failures.

Down the forested hill they stand at the peak of, the grass rolls like water by a downward gust. Smeared over a lighter green at their approach. Down the bare hill and past the valley at the bottom of the slide, another slope lies parallel from the view, this one as tree-studded with pine as the flat peak they stand on now.

RJ quotes this imaginary Scottish lad in a raspy accent: "'All this land before yee be nothin' but still life for ye eyeballs'. My grandpa said that once."

"Really?" Hammy asks jocosely.

"No." RJ sheaths his club into his bag and takes a knee to scout over the hillside. "I just enjoy having a headcanon for my dead family. It eases the pain," he breathes.

In contrast to his solemn demeanor, Heather leans like a dream against the leg of the chart and blurts, "My mom must've been HOTTER than a microwave burrito."

Hmph. May as well give the place a chance. Compared to their dream forest - which she finds they drew in a page of RJ's journal at the beginning of this ordeal - it's nowhere close, not even having a willow tree or a pond or anything worth colonizing. Nowhere to hang wieners from, most importantly. At least the scenery's nice.

"Nope, noooot even close," she sighs.

Hammy brought a baggie of hotdogs with him and everything, only to be met with a pickle relish display. "How're we supposed to have a weiner willow when there's no WEINERS?! Or wait… WILLOWS?!"

"Hammy, ya wanna just head home 'n write headcanons of my mom?"

"Oh she sounds like she was a very nice lady."

"Yeah. Hot, too."

RJ flips to them. "Well, we gotta get 'em in on this somehow! Where's he at?" he claps.

Their first subject had already admitted to Heather as being fine with a new home. Heather and Hammy bump a blindfolded Ozzie into the scene and guide him, a sleep mask left over his eyes.

By the soles of his feet he's pushed through the dirt, arms stuck at his sides. At some close point they shove his body forward off its balance, pick him up and remove his mask. They present him to the view over the impressive hill.

His eyes warm to the beauty immediately; Love at first sight.

The high sun dawns over the picturesque landscape. Specs of dust settle over his lens, giving the far-off trees the wonderful illusion of motion. Light doesn't linger on the same leaves each second, but it never leaves the community of the branch. Millions of reflections work over there to spark inspiration deep inside, in a picture worth millions of dollars. Wonderful. He finds himself drawing a blank at its fairytale charm, its authentic look, its flat screen dabbed with soft color.

Wow. It is still life for his eyeballs. Nearly brings a… tear, even. "Why… it's beautiful. Treasure for the eyes. Mushroom soup for the SOUL!"

RJ, Heather and Hammy insistently attempt to make a 3-way high-five work but mostly keep mashing their hands together in awkward ways, so in the end they're kinda just slapping at each other's wrists repeatedly until they're red. Point being, they've done it… really done it. One member of the family enticed - the first win!

Ozzie gets up into a tree cavity for a better view of the beautiful hillside. "That's it! Is this what life is? A living painting? Is this what life means?! Sweet jello cakes I will LIVE! I… WILL… LLLIIIIIVE!"

Following that smashing success, they delve into inevitable downfall, and end up smashing their heads into fragile windows of sanity. Don't tell them yet- or, wait, it already happened.

But the following trials are far too embarrassing and uncool to be told, as they would warn themselves for eternity. But here they are anyway, in a (hopefully) less embarrassing fashion for everyone, which begins with one single word:

HELP.

Hardly past that moment of victory they're already trodding over the train tracks of failure. So pretend to sympathize while this sad violin plays in the background:

Sniff. Sniff. On that same hilltop they offered Lou and Penny a new hollow log as replacement. Sniffle. It took an hour to pry them out when their quills got stuck in the bark, from what skinny wood the team had to make do with. They were out on the notion as quick as that. 'They're further out of their minds than the kids with caffeine'.

It won't fit. Screw that. They'll make it fit. But the parents easily denied them a second chance, with a log infested by ash borers.

They pack their bags and pursue their agenda elsewhere. Then what? Sacrifice their mental health for clout? They may as well stay stubborn on their plan even if the clout doesn't come and they're numbing their brains into the shape of animal crackers.

Tiger got poison ivy. Tripped into a patch of it. Landed on his feet (ha). Goddammit, cats aren't even supposed to get poison ivy! But Tiger did, somehow, submerged up his legs and only climbing higher.

Don't even ask what became of Stella. Boy, won't she love it when flaming wood chips hurl down on her head when, oh oopsies, a himbo dragonfly becomes a himbo firefly when it speeds through a cozy lil' campfire they made to warm her up to the place, then proceeding to tuck duck 'n roll on the nearest tree and ending up setting the WHOLE FOREST ABLAZE by spreading the flames like the PLAGUE! Dang California, what a state, right? If only they WERE in California to MAKE that kind of excuse.

They try location after location. They're never gonna get past Exhibit A, and who's to say they even know of an Exhibit B? They bribe everyone back into this nonsense, one by one, with Hammy's giant bulgy cute-face eyes and about three pounds of sugar total in the pastries they use. It's impossible to realize. Even if, say, some big-name animation studio offered to pick up this project and make a dream reality.

There's a reason their struggles fumble over themselves to be put into words.

Because among the extensive 'showing' of the characters and their repeated interactions with one another (for the effect of immersiveness), there's plenty of room for simplistic - and underrated - 'telling'. This new style of narration may or may not come off as bleak, but sometimes the word count must be respected. Really the entire chapter could be told through the storytelling of a picture book (at least that's the goal), yet it's quite stale if not happening in real time. That's why present tense is preferable over past tense in this situation - to imply the events are coming as they are written, as opposed to some wrinkly grandpa telling it back to the next generation of the progressive raccoon society secretly following along this railway into insanity. No one wants to hear fanfiction told from a wrinkly grandpa though. They want to BE the fanfiction, embrace themselves in it, develop unbreakable fictional bonds to very much breakable fictional characters. The irony comes into play when one realizes fanfiction is just creating fictional from the fictional. In other words, spiraling down as an aspiring author into an inescapable vortex of fictionality that quells any motivation they may ever have to ever create anything 'original'. But what's NOT original? Repeating the same words in a different tone - THAT'S original. Repeating the same words in a different tone - 'VERY original sirs and ma'ams, believe me'. Taking the same characters and placing them in new scenarios - original. Drawing out this expansive paragraph to create a paradox over the notion and intention of reducing the word count - original as original can be, right? All narrators should describe exactly the literary devices being employed at any given moment. It saves people the trouble of thinking, as no one with thoughts wants to do, and writers the trouble of trying to get the average, theoretical audience they have in mind TO think.

To top everything off, Verne enters a small clearing some time later. He must be begging to be abused by Mother Nature as well, if he's coming here, though he speaks of a different motive: "Just talk some sense into him- Okay wheeeere is he?"

By god, they've left the place a warzone. Trenches dug in loose dirt, soggy tree limbs cobbled into barbed wire, and stray eagle feathers roaming about. What kind of home is this? Verne's eyes abhor the idea of meandering past the entryway of the brush's edge. They are nowhere. Aside from their marks, no trace is left of them but the flipchart, hidden by trees and placed far from the epicenter.

"Huh!" comes RJ's voice, which alone sparks a twitching instinct in Verne's tail. "Didn't expect you to actually come be our test subject, Verne."

His nefarious location remains unknown to Verne. "Test subject?! What in the world are you DOING to our family, RJ?"

"Proceed to the center of the secured area, please."

Verne rolls his eyes and does just that. He must've waded too far into RJ's game to pull the plug.

The three give Verne a thumbs up from behind a janky, uncertain mess of a bush, in the safety of plastic-baggie hazmat suits.

"All clear!" says RJ.

Well if RJ wants a juvenile game, that's what he's gonna get. "Okay, here I goooo! Heh-heh." All Verne has to do is win it. Participating at all douses him in a frown when he turns his head forward, shaking it grudgingly.

Verne stands in the middle of the clearing surveying the place left and right. The sky is clear over him, but the torchlight of the sun's rays hint that the winds grow stronger by the second. The three in the back glance at a clipboard in unison.

"No eagle strikes, check," signals RJ.

Hammy marks it off.

Another carefree step puts Verne in a patch of damp dirt at the toes of a large, twisted tree with creeping roots. Nope, it was feigned hope. Nope, it was naivety. Large white mushrooms emerge under his feet, sharply bounce him away, then try to croon him in apology over the unfortunate series of disasters to come.

Verne yells out.

Oh no, not an ordinary yell - his dreaded 'holler of the hijinks'. As prolonged as it is, RJ tosses his casual attitude into a chain reaction of panic-inducing realizations. Verne's trapped on a hijink highway again. AGAIN. By the time RJ can react, he only processes one possible decision, being to hammer Hammy's clipboard. "Where's mushrooms on the list? WHERE IS MUSHROOMS ON THE LIST?!"

"It's not here!" he gasps.

Verne rolls by his shell to a pond, nearly identical to their one at home. It is far more threatening in the undertone that's been dug up.

"Daddy Washington, have mercy…" RJ grunts in anticipation.

Dizzy, Verne slowly rises by his knees and leans his head over the shoreline to peer into the water, which ripples faster and faster from one point he stares at. Then… a fat fish jumps up and bites onto his equally-fat nose.

"Aaaaaaaa!"

Complete terror stuns Team RPS during the sequence. Verne stumbles and trips and tumbles and shakes the biting fish off his nose and flings it back into the water. One of his hurried feet slams onto the sharp point of an acorn lying in the open grass. So he's steered backward by his aching sole, and trips the same way into a feral, messy patch of tall garlic mustard plants, with their tiny white flowers blooming dangerously in the direct sunlight and ready to crawl red rashes from the plant's sap up Verne's limbs and neck. He's eaten alive by his skin, in too much dismay to cry for help, only repeating his hijink yell as often and as primal as a screeching mating call.

The wind leads to heavy clouds that run over the sky and dim it to gray. Luckily this time, RJ, Heather, and Hammy break into the world of this horror film quick enough, to tackle Verne away from a flimsy tree snapped at the base by a storm of rain and wind rolled in, and abandon their safety to act as his bodyguards, as the moment called for it.

The wind leads now to sharp gusts that surround the circling protection the three bring onto Verne. Hammy unsheathes a magical silver sword, not quite cartoony and comical enough, but more of a last resort. The Fragarach tames the deadly tempest, jerking tree branches and pointing every blade of grass in towards the sword, and the group of animals huddled by it.

Through the coming night, they defend Verne from every ruthless force of nature, with Hammy's Fragarach on hand. That must be what's going on below, at least, while the moon calmly floats in a smooth curve over the clouds, over the earth's fiery dominion on them.

"AAAAAH!" screams RJ.

The moon strikes 10.

"AAAAAH!" screams Verne.

11.

"AAAAAAAAAAAA!" screeches Hammy the mountain goat.

The moon strikes midnight, and all calendars in this time zone rip a page away.

"Do you guys wanna practice screaming at our butts?" Heather suggests. "It's a 'possum thing."

The moon strikes 1.

RJ says, "…No."

"I do!" beams Hammy.

"Hammy, please don't," un-beams Verne.

Hammy tries his best to go at it, but his voice hits an awkward joint. "My… my vOcAl cOrDs."

"I'm on the way, Hammy!" Heather comes to the rescue. "AAAAAAAAAAH! AAAAAAA-!"

"AAAAAH!" screams RJ.

"AAAAAH!" screams Verne.

"AAAAAAAAAAAA!" screeches Hammy the mountain goat.

Verne's watch reads 9 by the time the chaos ends.

All is calmer now, but not calm enough. At the crack of dawn, a splotch of bird poop rains onto the top of Verne's head. It sizzles like a fried egg on his bare skin under the sun found past the storm. The team, servants for the occasion, sweep the mess off Verne and prepare an umbrella over him, but the monster of wind collected around Hammy's Fragarach slaps it over the treetops.

Next? A full, uncracked bird egg bombs onto Verne's head in response. It doesn't break. Over his furious mug, it sits.

When the air is calm, the group regather their senses, but now face a new storm found in the regions above Verne's shoulders..

The prior storm left no rainbow. It leaves silence.

"RJ," Verne starts at a crawling speed, lugubrious. "I am only gonna say it once-"

RJ looks both ways and raises an eyebrow without consideration for the turtle. "How many times are you gonna berate me like this?"

"As long as I'm waiting on you, RJ, to help us. There is nowhere out here, in this empty forest, that you'll find something better than our Log. Nowhere. Don't try forcing change on our family again." Verne drops his tone in disappointment.

Shudders fill Verne when he foretells it as RJ did with his 'raccoon senses' at the beginning of this whole ordeal: "They'll be coming here by Heather's birthday. That's what, 11 days from now? The 25th? We'll be fighting man itself, RJ. Are you going to stand up for our home?"

RJ squints. Surrounding hills thump a heavy ambient drum for him, foreshadowing his move. He lowers one knee to the ground and bends down. He's halfway there. Then the other knee. He slides his feet out and seats himself. He made himself shorter than Verne, somehow radiating more power and aggression snickering and hidden, breathing onto his neck from underneath. He had sat down.

Verne tilts his head up and frowns his testy eyes at RJ with vigilance. What a path the raccoon had chosen, the bold and clumsy revolutionary. The fighting line between them stretches far enough to never wobble again.

Hammy squints his eyes away. "Ooooo this's making my cheeks tense, I don't like it…"

Heather swerves in front of the squirrel, beside RJ, and repeats his exact movements… to sit down. She's as opposed within her face as him.

Verne pulls himself into shape, stiffens up his shell, and marches up to RJ. He snatches the head of the golf club right out of RJ's bag with a foul grunt.

The force he puts in jerks on RJ's shoulder, and enrages every noisy thing he's got above that point. "HEY, RJ JR. did not consent to your flubbery fingers!" He stands right up.

It took RJ until it affected him to do so. Verne takes the blue bird egg off his head and sets it on the ground beside the end of the club. Pity for RJ.

"I'm no golf champ like Tiger Woods…"

Verne taps at the ground with the club before swinging back and striking the egg into the tallest tree bordering the clearing, into a sad little nest where a lonely robin sits. The blue egg hatches open at once, and the mama robin is ecstatic to have her newborn returned to her. The ecosystem has been restored.

"But I can drive a birdie home."

He heads up to RJ and stabs the padded base of the club dangerously close to his toes, almost reliving his toe-stomping tendency, ticked on the heels to sting himself in RJ's face. From disappointment to anger, his shift is uncontrollable.

"And keeping order is MY RESPONSIBILITY. I have SEEN what it's like when there's no one willing to take proper responsibility; I've LIVED IT! You are breaking order, RJ, you are BREAKING IT! I am trying to keep this family under one lock and YOU are breaking it. You are BREAKING IT! I am going back to MY home, where you will not break what makes MY Log special to ME!"

The fuse of a cherry bomb begins to tick up RJ's pointed muzzle.

"Now RJ, I want you to go home and take the next few days to THINK about your mistakes. I'll check back at the end of the week, okaaay? Okaaay. How're we gonna keep this family under one lock… without SOMEONE to be the key?"

RJ thinks, but not for long.

Lou and Penny are just coming into the area as Verne leaves. They're worried sick, as to be expected.

"Where've you been, Verne-o?!" Lou blasts in fear and relief.

"We've been lookin' all night!" Penny says. "And the kids'll be up any minute!"

Ozzie wanders in from all directions with a beehive over his head, without any clue where he's walking. Even he's in a cranky mood, clear to tell past the hollowed obstruction of his voice. "Is there a BEEHIVE on my head or have I finally gone blind from this UNJUST WORLD-?! OW! Quit pinching me mother, I'm awake…"

No one pinched him.

When he enters, Tiger's showing so many bright red bumps popping through his fur he's in whimpering discomfort. "Please, this itching has kept me up for hours-!"

Stella smacks his arm. "Calm do-own. Verne, don't tell me yuh took the 'apologetic lemonade' bribe too."

Verne gives a "Morning everyone" as a routine deal?! "Let's just say it's been a rough night for all of us. We'll sort things out at home. Our home."

Team RPS is left to the elements. Homeless, the three of them, in now the most run-down neighborhood in the entire forest - the warzone they left it as. Nothing about it could hardly be livable. Forage-able. Soon it will be rotten, with worms tunneling through the fallen trees and uprooted shrubs that leave the surviving vegetation scattered and scarce. They aren't too pleased to have their names written on these graves.

"Well that was totally a dumpster fire," Heather restates redundantly to RJ, though it works as an outlet for her own irritation.

RJ twitches in the corner of Hammy's eye. "RJ, are you okay-?"

RJ kicks the golf club right out of the dirt. Really he stubs his toe more than anything. Actually, Verne stomping on his toe wouldn't have been worse. Maybe more than they wish to dish to others, anger brings harm to the angry themself.

A wheel of the team's flipchart veers playfully toward water. It tips the tippy tip of the diving board it's pushed across by two hustling individuals. The top rim tips a bit out. Heather and Hammy hold the bottom steady over this random resident's pool in the suburbs, ready to end it all, the former whispering, "Okay Hammy, on the count of three-"

"Can I say three? Can I say three!?"

"Get ready…" Her counting excites a juvenile nerve in him. "One… twoooo…"

Right before they dump the chart into the water, RJ bolts at them faster than a tsunami. "WHAT'RE YOU DOING?!"

"ARE YOU KIDDING ME?!" screeches Hammy the mountain goat- Er, just Hammy.

They drag the chart back onto the marble pad, and Heather rolls her eyes at him. Even Hammy lets out a grouchy sigh, tracking RJ, who paces as much as he is disgruntled after the Verne incident.

Ugh, just look at him, with that babyish flush. Of course out of instinct a hiss seeps through Heather's speech. "If you think you're angry, RJ, we are too. Chill out."

Accompanied by a little wimpy noise from Heather, a rubber duck, wet from the pool's edge, comes flying at his hip. RJ stops his pacing when it squeaks against him. "'Chill out'?!" His face comes at them like a bullet. "Does that man… have… a DEATH WISH?! He wants that dumb log when we've got a whole FOREST to steal from! Even IF we keep the place safe, the humans are gonna surround us anyway! He's puttin' everything we have on the line, puttin' stock in a fight… that doesn't even matter! Wha-!"

The sagged curve of her upper eyelid retains itself. "Look, I get your whole argument, but you're being the biggest 'whatever' I've ever seen. I mean like, you don't have to take your anger out on us, is all I'm sayin'."

"Yup. Yup. Gotta agree," Hammy adds before slapping a hand onto a blank page of the flipchart. "Could you come up with a new part of the plan? Something involving nuts, or… LE-MO-NADE?"

Lemonade sounds nice, after last week.

Heather tugs the flipchart back towards its watery grave - the pool. "Yeah jeez, this's really like NOT working RJ, like totally, those guys ALREADY wanna kill you after what happened last week." A history stained in spilt lemonade. "We would too-"

"-But we need you for the Fudge Sludge in your back pocket." Behind his leg Hammy pokes and nudges at the bottom face of RJ's golf bag eagerly.

RJ shrugs it away, and yanks the flipchart from Heather. "Okay c'mon, c'MONNN, did last week really give me such a bad name?"

"It was like, literally a GLASS of LE-MO-NADE!" Heather yells before heaving the thing towards the water again.

And he heaves back, again. "It was 95 damn degrees! We were all thirsty!"

Her signature sulky stare.

Hammy speaks for her expression. "Umm, she's about to say something like 'you so weren't gonna let us drink that cup anyway'-"

"You so weren't gonna let us drink that cup anyway."

RJ sighs, apologetic and frustrated. "You're right, you so weren't gonna drink it anyway."

"And then HAMMY almost got killed… NOT because of the lemonade thing-"

Hammy follows through by stomping onto RJ's toes, carrying unexpected anger. "My robot buddy is IN THE JUNKYARD now, Uncle RJ!" He hisses "The junkyard…" as a reminder.

RJ denies the notion with scrunched eyes. "That night wasn't my fault."

Up to confront him, Heather puts her knuckles against her hips. "Oop, errrrm kinda was, honestly."

"How was it my fault?"

Hammy zips his head between them as they spit words back and forth instantaneously like parents. A breeze brushes over him, and yet RJ and Heather should better get in the pool to cool off steam.

"He came down with a freaking ROBOT thing and you didn't notice," Heather says.

"Oop. ERRRM. Was I the only one who could've noticed? Am I your babysitter?"

She develops her own headache for herself, facing away to keep the pain of him from bouncing between her eyes. "YOU made us tired as helllll. Jeez. Can we just get over this?" She snags Hammy's hand and dares to divorce. "C'mon Hammy. You're my new best friend again."

Hammy too expresses his departure by blowing a raspberry at RJ.

"Woah woah woah hey, I'm not finished with you!" RJ stings into Heather's ear.

"Well I am."

"Quit excluding yourself!"

The sudden halt leaves the rattling of the pool water to fill the silence for several seconds. Instead of diving in she stands on the edge of her exit with her front put away from him. Thanks to the sun hiding itself over the rooftops, the heat of their words came from their emissions, opposed to the shaded marble putting a chill under their patted feet.

Now, she repeats it: "Excluding myself?"

"Look, I get it," RJ very blatantly pretends to sympathize. "You're almost 18. You're insecure. So how 'bout we go through 'RJ's step-by-step guide to guaranteed narcissism', yeah?" Of course before she can actually spend her thoughts at his shop, he's already written the check. "Step 1 - you are important. Say it."

She hesitates, but complies. "I am important."

"Great! Step 2 - consult your faithful, equal colleagues. Get 'em to remind you that you are more important than they are."

"Okay, easy enough." She does just that. "Hammy, am I important?"

Hammy, currently dipping his big toes in the pool, shoots back very casually at her, "More important than me."

And without a hint of the smirky manner one cheek snuck out to him, she confirms with RJ the same thing. "Am I important, RJ?"

RJ, currently having his brain cells play ping-pong in his head, expresses very casually to her, "More important than me."

"Awesome," she smiles. "Glad we all agree I'm in charge here. Here's the plan."

"Grea-!" There's not a second of pause for RJ to take before he enters a panic. "Wait shoot on second thought I just remembered why 'RJ's step-by-step guide to guaranteed narcissism' has R-J in the NAME-!"

"Shut up. I'm more important than you." To spit on his efforts, she finally bumps the flipchart into the pool for good. "So, Mr. Whatever-pants, there's ONE part of your plan that needs some Heather-ifying…"

RJ goes fishing in a hurry to rescue the flipchart from the water. That is until Heather snaps his line with one prick of a claw.

"We don't need to 'get them to like us' or 'get them on our side'," Heather outlines. "We just need to remind them that there weren't 'sides' to begin with! Ladies and gentlemen, what we're missing is…" She swings RJ tightly to her side, before he can go diving into the pool after the chart. "...family."

Hammy scurries up to RJ's other side, and has got enough time to slurp up a bowl of ramen and burp directly in RJ's face before he can unglue himself from her.

"This is very uncomfortable. And stupid," RJ argues. "Those guys hate my guts now!"

"No no, Heather's onto something," admits Hammy. "Maybe we can cheer 'em up with… oh, let's make it like Legoland!"

An entire rollercoaster comes up in the yard ahead - a colorful playground dismantled to transform it. Hammy makes stilts from stands, and slopes from slides. At the very peak, atop a bell tower, he plants a small red flag there, and rings over the field.

"Ta-daaaaaaa. Think they'll go nuts for this? 'Cuz I do!"

RJ flaps out a one-dollar bill. "Whadda you think about this, Mr. Washington?"

"There is nothing so likely to produce peace as to be well prepared to meet an enemy," he offers boldly as a face on paper.

Washington tempts him with those words. He's nearly drawn in. His lips go dull. Until he looks at Heather looking at him. "No." He grunts at the dollar, refusing to surrender. "No, I'm NOT going with this! This's stupid. I'm going with my plan. My plan good."

"Your plan doesn't work, RJ," Heather scoffs. "That's- That's like why we're talking about this."

In response, he thrusts a pointed finger into the horizon behind him and valiantly calls: "Anything can work as long as people accept I am stubborn enough to KEEP trying it!"

He doesn't move from this position. He looks like a major in the fool department.

Like a commander, Heather places her arms behind her back. "Hammy? Initiate Code Cookie."

He ain't ready for Code Cookie, seen in RJ's startled look. Hammy's on the ball, dashing at the Hedge. RJ can't figure out exactly why his heart jumps at that. Take the scene back home, to the food fortress of team RPS, where RJ witnesses it outside the central tower, helpless to what only Satan himself would dare do: Heather and Hammy break Jeffery (the chocolate chip cookie) from his designated picture frame on the food-built wall. Prepared to be devoured alive.

So RJ screams, louder than the devil, loud enough to muster the attention of Team Oak on the other side of home: "NO! No no, okay! NOT Code Cookie! Anyone but Jeffery! ANYONE but Jeffery-yyy!"

He bolts in there and shoves himself between Heather and Hammy to stop the nefarious act. Hammy snaps his nails onto the cookie and wiggles it to his open mouth.

"Hammy, YOU wouldn't eat Jeffery!" RJ pleads.

He certainly would not without just cause. Hammy presses the top of the cookie to his ear and listens a moment. Afterward, he states, "Jeffery says he is willing to sacrifice himself for the greater good."

Half of Jeffery goes right in his mouth. RJ yanks it out, hugging Jeffery from their clutches, terrified as a kid to losing a toy. "NO! This young, frivolous lad is the heart of our team!"

"So can you start thinking for the team?" Heather rolls her eyes.

"Oh GODDAMMIT! You furry noodles have NO sense of humanity-!"

"We're animals," Hammy points out.

…RJ fixes Jeffery onto his rightful place in the frame and finally sighs at Heather, taking in a much more civilized breath. "You're building castles in Spain here. But golly me, here's the wheel. So what's your first verdict, 'CHIEF'?"

"The first thing YOU'RE gonna do is say you're sorry."

"Yeees dear…" he groans.

Heather waits.

"Sorry dear…"

She steps onto his feet and folds her arms crossly. "And then, YOU are so gonna make it up to us."

"Yeees dear…"

"And lucky for you dude, I know JUST how to clear our heads."

Cut to a suburban street now, the three of them cramped in the gaps of a tire's metal wheel frame, of a revving car parked along the curb. The sports car blazes off without warning. One jet-quick rotation after another, before Hammy can be terrified enough to realize she was SO not kidding about the 'head-clearing' part, everyone has their brains turned to mush. Literally, it's a ferris wheel spinning its way down the euthanasia coaster. By the end of the street they are corpses, flung at top speeds back over the Hedge straight into the wall of the fortress.

They smash through into the bottom floor of the main tower (literally right where they just were), leaving a massive hole in the wall that allows a nice touch of natural lighting through. Though now the ground is messy with dented food boxes, and pretzel sticks scattered everywhere from a giant plastic bucket busted open somewhere.

"How was that, guys?" Heather asks.

"Yep-yep, head… cleared. Ow," grunts RJ. "Curly Fries, you never actually explained what this whole quote-unquote 'plannnn' is. We're walking into a shoe store without socks."

"Uh, well, the plan is called… 'Being awesome'."

"That's not a PLAN!"

"Is to!" Her confidence falls. "Okay, uh, I actually-... I have NO clue what I'm doing..."

She discourages her legs to fail and take her falling into a hopeless seat. The bit of sad fat she has sinks down her body and sags out of her sides, as her flesh loses as much form as her life force.

Not even their own leader knows what she's doing. She's killed RJ's momentum and sent him collapsing into a criss-crossed squat too. "Great." He claps louder than a laughing seal and it's outright insulting. "Genius, Heather, GENIUS! 'I thought we'd be screwed by step two so this is going GREAT'! Nice work, pal."

"Would anyone like a pretzel?" Hammy offers.

Neither respond. Why would either of them want a pretzel now?

Anyway, Hammy spouts out a whole complete plan of his own, even though no attention is paid to him as they're pouting: "Y'know, the whole family was working together when I almost got kidnapped. I don't mind if you put me on the verge of death again."

He's nearly eager. "It was pretty fun. It felt like I was a princess in a fairytale, like,"

Imitating gracefully, he hops and skips and bounces around the two sitting idiots. "'Oh Hammy, oh Hammy, let down your HAAAAA-'!"

He stops immediately to gasp, "Ohhhhh, OHHHHHHH! I know, I know! Let's take them ALL to the forest! Hey, hey RJ, Uncle RJ, let's take them ALL to the forest! Y'know, a family outing!"

RJ escapes his inner quarrel, tugged by the dying flicker of a firefly over his head.

"Hey Uncle RJ, why don't we-"

RJ squeezes his lips shut with two fingers and stands the heck up, pondering some deep thought. "Wait, I got it… A family outing…" He sighs. "Eh, that sounds riveting 'n all, but… how would we get them to go? They want my name on the Sniffer's hitlist, which it already is. They HATE me."

"Ooo, bummer. Maybe you could find someone they don't hate."

Instinctively the two face Heather, a puddle of dreaded hair remaining sat on the ground, having not seen the light coming from the hole in the wall far above her head. It soaks RJ and Hammy instead.

Something's hidden inside her, beyond her grumpiness, taken apart by the shadows. RJ erects his back just a slick bit further looking at her. A flower in a thunderstorm, approachable in nature beyond unfortunate circumstances, a front portrayed by her since whenever it happened, whenever she drew him in for the first time over a year ago, and then… She…?

They don't hate her.

"WaaaAAAIIIT a minute, wait a minute! 'Possum pal, stand up!"

From his spot RJ throws a rubber duck at her pouty-pout-face. Then a bouncy ball. Then a banana peel, clinging over her head and sucking her happiness away. She blows its icky flap away from her eyes in aggravation. Finally, RJ runs up and blasts an airhorn down her ear.

"Jeez-us Christ, WHAT?!" she screams.

He laughs at his ingenuity. At once, he gets some pretzel sticks and organizes them to illustrate - a few stuck in the ground as trees, others snapped in half to represent each family member, moving as a crowd into the salty forest.

"I've got a plan: some kinda family forest outing. Remember the night we saved Hammy? Everyone got all POOFED up when we were all workin' in cahoots. So we're bringing EVERYONE to the forest. At once. We'll spend all day looking for a place to settle this if we have to!"

"Didn't I say something like this?" Hammy wonders.

"Yep. Uh-huh," Heather pips sarcastically at RJ. A leader who's dried all motive from their own plan is a sad sight, and Heather fits that part. "Dude, y'know they're totally not followin', right? Wasn't the beehive on dad's head enough to LOSE 'em?"

Outside the fort, Stella and Tiger assist Ozzie in his dilemma. Head covered in painful stings and not-so-painful honey.

RJ ponders deeply over Heather's imaginable distraught. Nah. He shakes his head, then grabs both her hands.

…

She feels him lift her to her feet before her thoughts can flutter at the contact, at a natural remedy softening her tense arms and parting just for him.

"Oh no, see… they won't buy me." He flocks in her lone space, filling the ring of hopelessness around her. "The way I see it… RJ stocks are down… and Heather stocks are up. Ya feel me?"

On the brighter half of her moon where it lies waiting for the turn of the clock, this actually motivates it to flip suddenly, and defy time's healing and hurt. Heather… THE Heather… returns. Life and laughter come brought up her throat when she giggles like herself again and rants on her own page:

"Oh that reminds me, funny story, turns out I'm a fish sandwich sales-possum now because when I went to buy stock in Arnie's I think I accidentally bought out one of their locations in Canada. Whatever. I was so destined for Canada-"

Thanks to Hammy, a wimpy pretzel stick comes flying at her hip (yeah they're throwing a lot of things her way). Somehow, he of all people specializes in knowing exactly what constitutes too much talking.

Hands behind his back, RJ turns and walks. "The corporate world is all sin and no spirit. But this takes heart. Passion! Heather stock is a lil' somethin' I call 'emotional appeal'," he illustrates. "Scholars would call it somethin' stupid like…"

Before he finishes, he very smugly flicks the dirty banana peel off her head and spruces up her hair for her. "...'pathos'" is what he describes it as. "Get you got where I'm goin'?"

Something's hidden inside her, beyond her eyes: potential. The eyes themselves - the sky blue irises glisten when entering the light, channeling every drop of sunlight into her. He's got where he gets he's goin'.

Heather only squints her face back. "Are you calling me cute? Yay? Nay?"

He knew she'd get the picture. It hypes him up better than a Mach 6. "In a completely over-the-top, vague, non-flirty, objective sorta way YES! With cuteness comes practicality. YOU are the perfect spokesperson candidate with that innocent, youthful energy they wanna HEAR! I'm just an asshole, and Hammy, well he's just Hammy-"

"I trimmed my biggest toenail today with a spoon," he chimes in perfectly, being Hammy.

"-but they KNOW they can't turn down our cards…" So he meets face-to-face and firmly down-to-earth, peaking her interest with his gaze. "…when you're on the top of the deck."

A second of thought puts her conscience in a deep, reverbing trance. RJ's voice circles as she considers, nudging her interest at every angle, looping his image around her brain:

"We need your voice. You will deliver a speech to them. Get your voice out there… and get this family together. This was all your plan. Whaddya say, chief?"

Needless to say, she's tempted. Pictures of fame and fortune have nothing on family. She could be carving the turkey at the feast. Her plan? That's right, she's taken RJ's narcissistic lessons to heart, and pumped them as personal dominance through her veins. Dominance over insecurity and strain, struggle. She feels it surround her - the need to conjure, prove, secure a place at his side.

"Say yeeeeesss…" RJ urges almost silently.

Hammy does so in her opposite ear. "I think you should say yes toooooo. A speech sounds excitiiing."

"Alright," she simply decides.

"I'll give ya 'til the end of the week to write up a literary masterpiece." RJ pats her shoulder proudly before they disperse. "Mark it on Friday and be ready, champ! We got 4 days before this plan gets GOLDEN!"

"We'll be RICH!" Hammy exclaims. "Rubber duckies for everyone!"

When they leave her sitting in the fort, blank at reality, she notices the state of Jeffery's broken frame on the floor, waiting to be tended to since the food fight last week. That… just happened, just as this new honor granted to her does now. Act one - she completes the job, and creates a great sense of awesomeness gluing the frame back together and hanging it up on the wall. It takes some tippy-toeing to reach these heights, but she gets it situated just as high as RJ first did, as the jemstone of the team. She's in his seat now.

Again, she agreed to this? Not exactly a surprise to her, but now more weight presses down on her shoulders, though they rise in retaliation. Taken aback all the same. "Wo-ow. Guess I got somethin' to prove now. To RJ."

Soon, that cookie on the wall may become the jemstone of a greater team.

"Guess I gotta REALLY put this family back together!"

ACT II: Food for the Heart

From her glory there comes mysterious darkness. Until the picking of her claw in a lock cleanses the lightless dungeon. A click. From the backyard, RJ taps a creaky wooden door open into a basement room, and Heather dismounts from her place on the doorknob. Light from the outer, living world purges the boxy cavern.

"So you wanted to come here for… 'inspiration'?" RJ starts.

"Nah, I'm actually having a KILLER case of the 'snackies' right now."

"I figured," he smirks while tying a baby bib around his neck. "You still better get that speech done, otherwise, Friday's not gonna be pretty."

"No worries, dude. It's so at the top of my list." Beauty picks up and twinkles in her nose, putting in the work inspecting the obscure place before her eyes can adjust. "Do ya smell it, RJ?" she whispers.

"I smell a faint scent of fry grease," he answers identically. "And my bottle of Fudge Sludge."

"Sorry. I had to chug it all before Hammy did."

They're stocked in aisles, the assorted collection of 'junk' food shelves comprising the entirety of the dungeon. But as the world knows, one man's mass-produced schluck is all of America's cultural diet. American foragers included. Magically, when the two of them journey into the foreign land, they discover the gilded boon of RJ's raccoon tingle. Just like a supermarket every ceiling light emits a golden glow over the awaiting market with its untouched resources laid out over the land for them. Now comes the time to manifest their destiny, and rid the place and its crops of their missing harvesters… by eating all of it. None to spare. Destiny is not a dessert, not even a full-course meal, but the entire dang eatery.

RJ whispers it in awe: "Say goodbye to Ash Wednesday…"

"'Cuz we're about to be feastin' from this place," his companion finishes.

Heather's speech is the last of their worries now.

O-oh man, they raid as they please. Turn those shelves inside out and slobber all over them. They chug liters of only the most renowned soda brands, such as Conk and Bepis. Optimization comes afterward. Their tactics evolve to involve the drinker lying limp on the ground as the partner thrusts themselves up and down atop a bottle positioned upright in the drinker's mouth.

It's a lot to swallow, but imagining these two knuckleheads gorging their hearts out in such a confined period of time wouldn't be possible without the mounds of caffeine that go down their hatches. This whole feast becomes deja vu. It's only an elaborate trash can raid, after all. Heather climbs and runs along the shelves as a jet-propelled spider, sweeping can after can of whipped cream for RJ to drown his face in. Puffed in the stomach, the fluff makes him seem to be a porcupine with no quills.

Food is tossed around the basement like buckets of paint. The most delicious racket imaginable ensues from their mess. Their fur tackles away the dust of the room just as their mouths vacuum everything from the shelves. They go so far as to dip their feet in cheese sauce and suck it off their toes, as part of a tasty finale.

Their explosion of energy vomits itself up just minutes later.

RJ can't help but burp from the aftermath of their wild feast. His cheeks are covered in grape jelly and crumbs of Spuddies. "So uhhh…" Between the two of them, RJ's the fattest pig in the barn to a sack of meatless bones. In fact, Heather has gained literally no weight, compared to the mushy hill of a stomach RJ has, lying on the floor. "Your stomach capacity… It's impressive."

"Wow," Heather exhales in a laugh, not at all having her airway obstructed or stomach bloated from the event. "Somehow that's your weirdest compliment yet. Nice one, dude."

Instead of responding as a civilized being, RJ unleashes and prolongs a pained noise that sounds, very simply, as exactly as he let it out: "Ahhhhhh!"

"What?" Her face is dumbed down by his off-putting reaction. "Your weirdest compliment? Put THAT in the record book."

RJ's brain melts in his head by that same stale tone her mouth emits. "AHHHHHH! YOUR complimenting sounds like sarcasmmm! Don't DO thaaat!"

"So your secret weakness is getting compliments from me?"

He's still hurt. "Look, taking compliments from women is hard, okay? I blame society."

The dusty cold floor doesn't stop Heather from lying back across it to treat it as lavishly as hotel rooms in the French Quarter. "Really though," she suggests, "Let's just laze around 'n enjoy this nice friendly gig we got goin' on here."

RJ's walkie talkie plays a ringtone inside his bag.

"Oh!" comes the surprise from his lips. "Speaking of societal burdens… there's Verne. We've got this new lil' agreement he called 'filling up the ol' cave again'," he explains. "Of course he's gotta keep me in check about it every 15 minutes. Pretty nifty though, might I say."

Foolishly, Heather's so lackadaisical about his talk at first. "Okay, that's… what we should've been doing all last week." Then why bring it up now?

She finds her answer when RJ drops the nice friendly gig, spanks his bag in a hurry, and flips the phone up to his ear like a busy businessman. "Hey hey, start packing the rest of it!" he orders her, nothing like the affable moment they've just enjoyed. "We're gonna fill this cave like a man patches drywall!"

'The rest of it' means the junk they've yet to eat.

"What?" Heather challenges. "All that stuff we found that WE could eat?"

"I canNOT stay on the wrong side of the turtle's shell, okay?" he whispers sharply away from the phone. "With this plan, I reckon we'll pret-ty busy from now on."

Pretty busy? PRET-TY BU-SY? Was she hearing that right? Verne says they're busy all the time, but when RJ does, that has to mean something bad. Real bad. Heather pins these points together. He never calls it 'being busy'. He calls it a 'heist' or 'adventure' or 'side quest' or something less boring or lame. 'Busy'? How busy do they have to be for HIM to say it? The Log's full. The entire SITE'S full, even, especially after last week. But the cave's empty. They drained it in whatever nonsense they were doing last week. RJ sounds like he's doing this for Verne. Verne LOVES filling things apparently. He's not gonna stop for a second of fun until that cave's full. That BIG BEEFY room in the cave. Normally going after that food would be a clap and a half for her fun receptor, but with VERNE at the wheel, there'll be no mercy to get that work done. 'WORK'. 'Work'? Is this it? Is her life over?

Then, her fuse ticks off, until her security blows to pieces alongside the fruits of recreation. The walls come down on her leisure, and she goes: "Wait wait wait, no no no, HOW busy-?"

XXX

Heather finds herself in the midst of trepidation without warning or fanfare.

"Next time," RJ tells her before leaving her speechless to herself.

Not surprisingly, but not any more merciful to her disheartened soul, this little roadblock extends far past that basement. Far past. Leaving that sight of tragedy for good, being home sweet home in the forest doesn't stop RJ from turning down her plans and leaving for his own. Her brain's been moved from one bin to another. From work to play. Putting the responsibility of that speech on herself was the first mistake, and who knows if she's even written a word. Now RJ's got quite the bundle himself from Verne - play to work - and Heather quells her spirits into darkness, her front slouched down.

"Oh for Pete's sake..." Already she knows what pain's been showered over her, and she just wants to dry.

Hammy appears in a homemade costume of a young rosy-cheeked boy stitched together and draped over him. "Hello feral, hormonal youthling! I'm Pete!" Pete's toothy demeanor leaves cherries of cheer for her to pick, if she accepts them.

Instead she breaks it to him quite sourly: "Hammy, that's not helping. RJ can't make time for our regular doorbell prank session cuz he's too busy trying to like, not make Verne mad, I guess."

"Oh sweet. Today's not a good mad Verne day." Unfortunately, Hammy completely misses the ballpark of her frustration, and she feels it.

She waits for RJ to return through the Hedge. Even with cheese puffs to snack on this takes hours upon hours or, in reality, a couple minutes.

"Now can we go doorbell pushing?!" Heather nearly begs.

"Later." Yawning, RJ repels himself with his swanky sack of food for the cave, nearly begging to, it seems to her.

The afternoon passes, and after supper they're back at it with the heists. RJ has to grab her arm so tight it cuts her circulation, just to get her inside the front door of a house when Ozzie picks it open. But a bed of flowers outside, she stains over her mind. The whiff of many colors, a poppy pansy and petunia - 3 great 'possum names, by the way - turned gray by the dim entrance hall of the residence.

When they're at the mouth of Vincent's cave after the fact, Verne oversees a marked list in a very satisfactory manner. None of that pleasure is marked on Heather. RJ sated Verne's demands, now to pile them in the backroom. Heather doesn't help to unpack the bottomless stock. RJ works too tirelessly in Verne's metal clutches to notice her idleness, let alone her. Not a single glance comes her way. The cold stone wall makes for a better friend. It warms to her back the more she lets it have hers, when she's otherwise alone with a mindless worker ant.

'Next time'.

Why is she the only one particularly bothered by this? Why is she… the only one to see it at all? None of the others seem to even be. Be… at all. Over a day's time, she remembers talking to RJ and not one other soul. 'Talk' generously describes it. She's thrown dirty banana peels off her head and at his feet, when she's a mole in a garbage can. She's gotten so trashed by trash without ever cracking a smile.

'Next time'.

She's gone 'head-clearing' on the busiest roads, spinning herself violently in the frame of a car's moving tire as they did together earlier, losing consciousness by the second. She thought she'd forget. RJ and possibly a few other heads make sure she never does. They're unpacking a delivery truck. Not helping the humans of course, but helping themselves, and helping her assume his voice to be a hallucination.

"Next time."

She's gone metal-detecting in backyards, with RJ graciously pointing out he ain't got time for dat. So she uncovers Hammy underground, with a vintage 1800s metal can of 'Lincoln's Premium Nut Jar'. And at the same time, he's out of the roots of her head, and into sight once again.

Hammy happens to be here for her, even though she never finds the motive to address it. She works alongside him, maybe… After all she hasn't counted one box, fruit or pastry of her worth to these heists. She's counted time. Nothing but time. Time is a very boring thing to count. The higher it goes, the slower it grows.

And when their work the next day appears just about done, Heather waits for RJ to join her in the living room. That's ambitious thinking. She waits, nothing else.

Flat, fat, and lazy across that couch cushion, she calls, "Keepin' the fort warm for ya, dude! Thank me later."

A while passes. "Damn, ya want those cheeks toasted or what?!"

Another while. "...RJ?"

She swings her head over the curving armrest, and creases her ears down her face. In a doorway some ways behind the couch, at the back of the room, Ozzie and the porcupine couple converse, while the rest of the house bustles with subtle movement and critter-y chatter.

"Where is Heather?" Ozzie asks the couple.

"Eh, she's kinda lazin' about back there, y'know." Lou rats her out with a finger pointed to the living room.

Heather tilts her head away when every eye advances into her lonesome.

"Lou, let the kid have her fun, dear," Penny insists. "It's what she's here to do."

"I'm just glad she's not in harm's way," Ozzie tells them. "Not… that there's any harm here, at the moment."

They have a human man pounding on glass somewhere in a bathroom down the hall, locked inside a shower chamber. The trickling of icy water pelts the tiled floor.

Ozzie concludes on this note: "If she's having fun, leave her be."

Heather throws her head against the couch. They talk like they own her sometimes. "Maybe that's just what I am. A kid." An attraction of sorts, or some kind of burden. RJ even kept the golf bag on the couch too, for her, as a promise to return. What a burden she must be to condition a busy guy like that.

RJ… He runs through the room and leaps onto the couch like a hero for her at that moment, to her radiant delight. "Sorry I'm late-"

"RJ!" Verne calls before he's at ease for even a second. "We need your help!"

Heather's already placed herself upside-down against the back cushion with her neck bent crookedly by the mushy seat, hopes crushed, a grumpy gus.

RJ still has the inhumanity to sigh, "Next-"

"Next time…" Her tail strangles his muzzle and bends his bones out of place. "You're gonna be tied to me. Tail… to… TAIL!" She goes ahead and has her tail jerk RJ and his busy butt off the couch, sending him on whatever busy-ness he MUST attend to. She leaves too, by that moment.

Enter her into a brighter nook of the house, as she's preparing to enter some white, polished pool. Water settles at the top when a faucet stops pouring. "I guess if he won't enjoy me… I'll just enjoy me." She wades her legs in.

She settles into that bathroom sink, submerging up to her chest, breathing a big hum of relief when the warm water measures up her fur and protrudes the coat. Numbness it brings for the first second - a loss of reality and stress and responsibility, underneath the softly-lit bulbs above. Her eyes go up as if her pink skin had a sensation normally akin to taste buds. The drain is clicked in at the bottom to keep this warmth from leaving - perfect to allow her to swim and waddle through the small, circular pool like a bathtub.

"I'm so bored I might as well get a bath while I'm here. SUPER unlike me, but…"

From a bottle leaning over the sink, she squirts soap over her head and down her back. It runs into the water, dispersing at her waist. She fuzzes her foamy fur with a flat hand and brushes it with the claws. Her tail relaxes in the water. She even improvises a little ditty to amuse herself as her natural odor disintegrates, without any remorse or regret in her captivating singing voice:

"OOOOOOOOHHHHHH…. If I could head to Ar-niiie's, what sandwich would it be? They've got beef 'n turkey, chicken, 'n even fish fiLLEEEEEET! OH, but imma gonna build-my-own awesome fish bur-ger, and it goes: Buuuun and a fish pat-ty, then lots 'n lots of cheese, 'n I want ketchup, mayoooo, 'n even lettuce please, but no pick-llles, I hate pick-llles, pickles are laaame, they can DIE-"

The bathroom door busts open, scaring her half to death. Whew, she nearly had a dad moment. Now THAT would've been embarrassing.

RJ (a grave mistake for him to enter) spots her dripping with soap in the sink immediately. "Heather, where've you BEEN?! Chop-chop you gotta work; Your folks think I'm letting you live like some privileged white girl-! Wait… were you just singing? About Arnie's?"

She stomps herself out of the sink and fumes at him over the edge of the countertop, seeping a hiss out the corner of her mouth, drawn back to show a tooth or two. How sharp she does it flinches RJ's countenance into a frightened state. He scans her soap-covered balloon body for a way to sway topic. Suds and water plop in thick groups off her fur.

"Ooooo, you're wet. I could dry you off," he offers. "Raccoon fur is super absorbent. That's why the humans are so jealous they wear our skin like it's a million dollars."

Her dripping temper is a bit overdue to startle him. What she needs is consolement, though for what?

"Aaaaand… Oh! Our hugs are pretty great too! We're uh… known for our hugs. Yep."

But everything he says sounds sarcastic, even an objective phrase. Heather's heat rises up her legs and to her heart.

"So THIS is what you have TIME for!?" It explodes from her lips before her thoughts respond. She lets it loose. Now her heat, her embarrassment - her pink skin turned red - has reached her face and been exposed, turned vulnerable, and the only thing she can do now is jump off the sink counter, slip over her wet and soapy feet a few times on the cold floor, have her warmth removed (all but her seething face), and stampede for the door.

RJ watches her pass. "Oh good, you're coming to help?"

"I am so never singing again. Never. Nuh-uh."

She stomps out the doorway. Water trickles in a sweeter trail behind the grumpy lump.

"Dunno what's her problem," RJ lets out. "She's got a million-dollar voice. It'll be perfect for her speech…"

All wet and practically submerged in soap, she gets back to working with Hammy packing up the wagon outside, food relayed by a ramp of plastic wrap. She sniffs. "I hate smelling good."

"I think you're being clingy," Hammy puts bluntly, continuing to work.

"Am I?" she wonders, not continuing to work. Whether her situation with RJ is plain obvious, or just something Hammy is particularly attentive to, she doesn't question.

"Yup."

"That was rhetorical, thank you Hammy."

"Oh."

RHETORICALLY, she laments to him: "See, all this 'doin' stuff' is kinda makin' me thinkin', like, it's been a while since we've actually DONE STUFF together."

"Whaddya mean? He always spends time with us." Heather doesn't even notice him eating up half the family's food they load on the wagon - the nut-related products - as he talks.

"RJ's spending time WITH us but not FOR us. Goin' on these heists 'n stuff, but not really… hanging out. I mean like, we used to dip our feet in cheese sauce and suck it off our toes."

"Sounds awesome."

"It was totally awesome," she whimpers. "Where'd the fun times go, Hammy?"

"I dunno." His basic responses make it sound like she's puking her words at a brick wall.

"Whatever, and-... and everyone thinks it's just for fun, but…" Her, a bouncy soap balloon, trails away and never finishes that sentence.

"Oh." Hammy takes a second to process. "Oh! Okay! Bye-bye, Heather!... Have fun today!"

XXX

The suburbs call to her. She overlooks them on top of the Hedge, the sun's love shredded over rooftops. Inflatable yard decorations and shouting kids, some bounce so high and shout so loud on trampolines she can hear them drag her heart from here. Her heart… is hungry. SHE'S hungry. She's two KINDS of hungry, however that's possible.

"I just gotta see more of it…" she thinks. "Like, who knows when all this could just get, I dunno, TAKEN AWAY like we almost did. There's NO WAY dad'd let me go alone… Barely doable as is…" Her thoughts accelerate and heat like gas. "'Next time'. 'Next time'." The massive behemoth food fortresses the family has built since last week don't help her find justification. "LOOK at these dumb hunks! We've got enough food to last ME three weeks! Which is impressive."

RJ works somewhere back there, swaying between his bag and the ground to unload food like machinery. One by one, there's Wacky Whip (that's hers), some weird obscure off-brand snack food (that's… hers), and a big fat bunch of bananas (there's some kind of trend here). Each one is familiar to her, and each one pieces some puzzle together, some puzzle of curiosity and tightened confidence she is relieved to loosen.

"Hey, mental narrative coach."

"Yo what's up?" her coach answers.

"If I'm 'just a kid'… how come I scored more of that food than anyone last heist? If I'm just here for fun, how come I'm the best player here?"

"Well you eat more than anyone too, so like, it kinda balances out."

"Honestly, I don't even remember pickin' that stuff up. I just know I did."

"Yeahhh, it felt like you were focused on waiting for RJ the whole time, didn't it?"

"Still-! Wait wait, hold on." Deep concentration is necessary for her to breathe in deeply through her nose and recite RJ's steps to guaranteed narcissism: "I am important. More important than you."

"Wut?"

"I'm tired of clinging around! Y'know what, yeah, I'm gonna DO something about this! MY-self."

RJ works like machinery. And like machinery, she notices the repetition of RJ's work. Some kind of… beat to it. Like music. Behind the willow tree… her and RJ have a collection of electronics. She can see it from here, just a glance from RJ further up in the foreground. Her fuzzy eyes make out the sunlit gleam of a CD in the grass, back there. By the time she's looked back at RJ, he's packing excess food into the red wagon, ready for transport to the cave.

"So let's have some freakin' fun, RJ," she grins and vents very lightly as a snicker.

She jumps into action. Her new plan shines true, sure to open the cage locking her awesomeness in.

When life gets fun, the brain will take it and run. Be it a piece of warning or wisdom. Time will tell, as the week ticks down.

Her plan delivers itself as easy as could be - a delivery truck delivers a scraggy skinny surfer-lookin'-guy (with blonde wet spaghetti for hair, a dope chain necklace and slumped-out pelvis), who delivers a small envelope into the mailbox staked in front of their team's fort. The weirdo delivery guy slips the envelope over her stomach - Heather there to receive it, lying in the red box with her legs and tail sticking out the front.

"There ya go, my furry freak!" the guy crashes as a wave from his lips, rocking out beneath his green beanie. "Hang ten with ya later, duuuude!"

"Thanks Surfer-Lookin'-Guy!" Heather calls from deep inside.

Surfer-Lookin'-Guy drives through the Hedge, leaving no mark in it. His radical music fades away, lingering as pumped-up vibes in Heather's soul. She rips the paper to pieces inside the box and unravels a used CD, dull on one side and drawn over with a label of black sharpie:

'Our Town'. The track hardly mattered. So long as RJ doesn't recognize it.

"Hey Verne!"

RJ's voice snatches her attention. Shoots her curious head out the rim of the mailbox, so excited it knocks into the roof. RJ prepares to depart in the direction of Vincent's cave with another red wagon-load of food strapped on top, and the golf bag on his back.

"Is this a bit overkill for the quota?! I've got enough in JUST the bag to last Heather three days! Which is impressive!"

"So long as that cave's full, you could go out 'n be as dumb as you want!" From the safe, not-dumb protection of the Log inside his fort, Verne backs out on that notion immediately. "Wait, forget I said that, you'd kill us all."

Before RJ leaves, Heather flails out. She must secure her chance, the one and only. He may not notice her now, clinging onto the food wagon as he pulls the cargo along without a care, but he will. O-oh, he will. Until then, she sneaks her new CD behind her back.

The cave is no different. Steady as a queen in the backroom, the worker ant in RJ takes no account for Heather leaning against the opposite wall, while he works tirelessly to unpack and organize a cornucopia of food filling all available space. It'd put the outdated 'Do not feed the bear' sign - always having nudged tourists to do the opposite - to shame.

She holds the CD, ready. She examines it again, then RJ, crouched with her back to her, shoveling boxes of cookies out of his bag in her direction. Nah. He ain't a worker. This worker has no queen, motive, conscience.

One item flings high above the rest. A much hairier fella, straight into her arms. Why it's Hammy, out of RJ's bag, now a baby in her arms. That's all of Team RPS collected in one location - it seems like it's been forever already. But what did she sacrifice to carry another? The CD slips from her hand, and before her tail can catch it… it rattles on the hard floor. Heather covers Hammy's mouth before he can ruin her cover. RJ's head perks up straight… but patiently holding her breath, Heather releases one once he simmers down.

Only now, pressure comes down on her like the roof of the cave closes in. And the walls. And the mounds of food here, colorful boxes, but demons inside. At least to her, patronizing her for the loss they've brought, the time RJ's wasted away from her, and for crying out loud she can't take it anymore! Beside her foot, she kicks the CD to slide across the uneven floor on its dull side to the dead center of the room, underneath a bright bulb shouting 'I am here! Remember what's special in me?'. Quit foraging for food and start foraging for fun.

Her teeth clench. She carries the sweet child, and herself, out of the room for good.

RJ empties every last piece from his bag, and glances around. The entire room is nearly full. He wipes off a sweat and stands up, beaming with pride.

Just when he's ready to leave the room, a rainbow glare pierces his eye from where his feet walk in the center. A CD. He nearly stepped on it. It has no friends nearby among the food peaking to the roof of the room. Though maybe it is friendless entirely, lost for years.

He picks it up. The dull side is a solid navy blue, a piece of faint yellow scotch tape spread across in mediocre condition, reading in black sharpie:

'Our Town'.

XXX

RJ sits behind the willow tree at home, marking down the new, unexpected CD in the back pages of his journal, where his and Heather's electronic findings are listed. Their stash of board game boxes and other organizational items hold those gathered prior - memories perhaps, but this one from the cave draws a blank to him. No story behind it, no reason to exist at all. But it's here, so he marks it.

Heather bounces herself into his composition. She alters his whole key when stuffing earbuds into his ears from behind like she's about to mug him. That could hardly be the case. She hops back and deals him a good listen to what's blasting through the wire, from a small green CD player she's got in one hand.

Seeing him go blank has her grinning preemptively. His marker-held hand slouches off his journal. The 'Our Town' CD - merely a prop for her heist to his heart - falls out of his grip. His head collapses backward into the cradle of her cutesy feet. Snatched the frisky little raccoon for good, a fresh piece of his attention, his preoccupation, lying underneath her legs in a wide-eyed trance. Completely tranced. So expressionless by what fire's being spat into his ears that his posture and ability to speak has burnt to a crispy marshmallow. Rough on the outside with a soft and fluffy inside she bites into with no concern for a burnt tongue.

Heather ejects the mini-CD - 'Love in an Elevator' by Aerosmith, duh - and leans down onto him to pluck the earbuds from his ears. Two pairs of blue eyes meet. Heather appears upside-down to him, and RJ to her. Even then they feel right-side-up, joined by the beat in spring.

And even listening as equals, Heather's shadow spreads its playful wings over him as one perky mentor to student. "Paper beats rock…" Team RPS. Raccoon for rock. Possum for paper. He has much to learn to decipher the meaning, the TRUE meaning, of the metaphor, which will definitely never ever come into broad light again.

The tip of her tail wiggles a bit.

Lured by the music, snared by the DJ and staying for her smile, RJ submits. He can't evade her rock 'n roll awesomeness forever. "Well… played" puts it simply. Well played.

"What're you waiting for? Let's stock this rack UP!"

Welp, RJ's dropped his day harder than the beat. That does it - turtles turned to tracks and food turned to fun. His railroad shifts lanes and for once in ever, he jumps up in her name with an empty inner plate. She's the chef.

So he helps her throw it together in a jiffy: a toilet paper holder nailed into a tree, where they slip their greatest CD tracks onto the roll. A large sheet of poster paper down the body of the tree, and Heather climbs up to slather her writing over it in red marker:

'Heather's Banger Roll'

Heather joins RJ in observing it. A sub-message waving from a flagpole stuck out from behind the tree reads:

'Don't forget to wipe…

WITH BANGERZ!'

RJ turns his head, volume low in intrigue. "...So how much of this 'fun-fest' have you planned?"

Heather's ecstatic to be tugging his arm, so much so she just about sweeps him off his feet. "C'mon dude, we're gonna be late!"

"Oka-ay, okay!"

Under her lead, he blazes a trail of vibrant aesthetic straight to the Hedge, straight out of words. She jogs each pace on beat, and he follows her notes. The world dims a bit, or maybe it's just her face lighting up, but he sure can't tell. She's so prepped for this moment that RJ has just a second or two to repeat the path she lights for him before his commitment to her pleasure will die one killer concert short. He can't miss it - miss her. When his legs throw him off, order him to stop, poke at him with hesitance, he laughs and tunes them out.

The Hedgies gather at the wheels of a parked car on the street, and make an amphitheater view around Verne leading them. RJ and Heather arrive last after some brief… shenanigans… to put a little worry in Verne's face, witnessing the mischievous nature they carry when moseying in.

Something about a whole 'receptacle raid' they're about to do on the suburbs this evening after the humans have just finished supper. Blah blah blah, RJ and Heather smirk at each other for about five whole minutes, poking at each other behind their backs and behind the family. They've put just an extra foot of distance between the rest of the pack.

Nudge-nudge from elbows to ribs - it's all fun and games until Heather accidentally stabs RJ with her elbow so hard it knocks him to the ground in pain. But then it's fun and games again when they have to justify it to Verne. 'Evening rib pains. Typical for raccoons'.

'Explosive nostril tremors' - RJ jabs two fingers up Heather's nose to counterattack. Now this is sounding like an RPG game.

Verne goes on for a while, saying something about filling the cave "all the way to the top" before the group splits up for the mission.

Well screw this.

RJ and Heather steer themselves off the family's path to pursue their own, now riding in style on their signature red-hot open-top RC-Lamborghini. They drive far from the scene at MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE, with a trash can they spilled some ways back successfully distracting the family from their absence. Though a grim passover looms above, the clouds seem to completely clear for the two of them.

"Woo-ho-HOO!" RJ cheers.

Cool fingers shoot left and right. Every human they point their swagger at feels so lame they just have to move out of the way for RJ and Heather. Even at this time of day, the streets are bustling with those terrified, drowsy adults returning from work.

A whole sea of them disperse screaming at the true aristocrats of the suburbs, and RJ kicks back in his tiny seat. "Y'know, I'm something of a Moses myself."

Heather taps him rapidly, pointing down the side of the nearest house. "Wait wait I smell it!"

"Well I trust your nose."

So RJ at the remote swings them abruptly from the sidewalk to the alley, throwing out half of Heather. She asked for it. They leave the car and follow the neat grass to the backyard, where a plethora of upbeat tunes dances in their ears, mixed with the livelihood of a full family.

The backyard, as crowded as they imagined with pink creatures, runs down a far hill. As a child gains momentum down a colorful slip-'n-slide tube in the dead middle, the mania of the festivities collects wetness too. Sprinklers covering the lawn, kids drowning each other with water guns and hoses, and the whole place has a scent of fertilizer and chlorine. With the state of the warm setting sky the suburban setting would be very picturesque if it weren't for it. Straight chaos with a musical beat to regulate it.

Yellow and white flower bushes line the hill, flashing the path down the yard like an airplane runway, all to acquire the human dad's CD about to enter a radio at the very back, positioned just past the exit of the slip 'n slide.

The sly spirit in RJ's eyes gets broader. Heather catches his look. "Got a plan?" she presumes.

"Glad you asked," he winks.

Her arm is yoinked and she's bombing head-first down the slip-'n-slide tube before she can space herself an inch from him. Swirling, glowing colors flash over her until another spout of water blasts into the tube over their coats, and she's blinded briefly again, and laughing. Life's cooler than lemonade down the squeaky surface, and when a small ramp at the end bumps their chins and they enter open air, water truly encapsulates her.

It's never been so free.

They fly at the perfect angle to tackle the CD from the dad's hand. Underneath the massive shade of an overhanging tree, everything blinds in a blur. Still the surface of the CD shines as a rainbow glare when Heather's arms latch onto it.

It's never been so facile to feel.

Over the back fence the opposite backyard beyond the border lands them inside a hula hoop. Gravity straps them to this wheel as the fantastic ride bounces them across the yard and onto a trampoline. Laughing or screaming, they fling as high as treetops and rain their wetness from their hair over the world below.

It's never been so fun.

They can't dangle in the air forever. RJ slings his yo-yo of neon orange and blue at the lightning rod of the nearest rooftop. Heather snaps a pic - she's wetter than laundry - before hugging tightly onto RJ's golf bag - the only thing keeping her jovial gratitude off RJ himself. And when the yo-yo hurls them planting onto the back face of the orange roof, they can rest, side-by-side, sitting against the curved bricks covering the top edge.

By that point, on that point, they're home. As far from home they are, nothing quite matches the limpid sensation that laxes Heather's arms when she puts the new CD in her tail through the finger hole and shoves it away into the top of RJ's bag. One meets the mat at the door after trailing through the rain, and in the same way and without any strength left in her quivering body, she collapses as a hairy wet bean bag onto his arm. Her matted cheek squishes against the point of his shoulder, hardened by confidence but going welcomingly soft as a seat for her, while she also grips the spiked soft and soggy fur her right hand finds between his back and bag.

Every time she pants, another drip goes out onto him. His soaked fur drains out in trickles onto the roof, so together they work from their play to pour the moisture out of themselves. He cradles her against him to keep that kind of personality close - that kind of character she always spilled all over him - as genuinely and affably as the exhausting moment allowed. RJ just laughs.

As lusty and enraptured as she's ever been, her mouth dangles open in hopes of absorbing the tree-fed air into her and fixing her lungs. He must be the craziest guy she's ever met. Meanwhile his countenance fixes hers, as she nearly snorts or suffocates from her lack of breath, but manages a smile the whole way through. Combatant as these forces may be, they come across her independently, as though her heart sought to tear free from the lungs walling it. Heather laughs alongside him.

From this point she could've died right on him. He could've died as well frankly, in that orange sunset, like their souls are spilling free as water out of their fur, merging into one puddle drying in the cracks of the brick, to fade into the air.

RJ nudges her. "We're in…?"

"We're out," Heather giggles.

"Never without." RJ throws her a fist to bump.

Instead of a bump, her fingers extend and wrap the hand as a sheet of paper over his rocky fist. Paper beats rock. Even RJ forces himself to applaud her clever move through a grin and a sly little nod.

Time passes. The other Hedgies run from a gruff gray-suited woman hunting them down with a newspaper (dunno how that happened). RJ and Heather? They run through the Hedge.

Behind the willow tree at home, a new CD added to their brand-spankin'-new Banger Roll gets introduced by RJ's hand into his journal, doodled to perfection.

"There it isss…" RJ gongs over the complete portrayal.

"There it isss…" Heather repeats at his side, so close she's brushing his fur with hers.

"Do ya get me now? When you work hard, you'll find lots of time to play down the road. But you are so focused on the play thing, you're kinda…" He dizzies her with a finger. "...loo-loo- losin' track, y'know what I mean?"

She backs off an inch. "Was I too big of a lazy-bum?"

"Okay, you… maAaAay have been an overachiever on the lazy-bumming," he confirms in all non-insulting technicality, "But I think I get you now. What WE just did… This IS 'work' to you."

Having no clue how he'd figured, she realizes this happens to be quite the perfect description to cling to. Work doesn't have to mean breaking a sweat, but she is sweating. Her work wore her out as much as anyone else's. Does a lazy-bum look like that? A map of the suburbs she has by memory. It's beginning to show here, one CD at a time.

"It's why you want the family back together more than anything, ain't it?" RJ explains for herself to piece together. "You want everyone to live the good life, the fun life…"

She shines from everything he sends into her eyes.

"Spuddiesss, Sludge Fudge, CDsss, even the luxurious novelty of family, it's all food at the end of the day, some of it's just…" Not much of a way to explain it, is there? He ends up shaking his head and putting a finger to the center of her chest. "...food for the heart!"

Certainly doubtful he'd ever truly know how much heart-food she ingests that warm evening. "You're the best, dude." His gesture put some fidget in her fingers. "Like really, I mean um… This's more than just 'fun' to me." Her two dorky teeth stick widely out.

Then she lets herself sink too deep into intimacy. Her tail, subconsciously, sways over to RJ's and nearly hugs itself around it. It skids on his fur underneath. Heather breaks it loose with a jerk that reverberates up her spine. RJ jolts his back up straighter in surprise - a warning to her. Heather leaves to load up the CD onto the toilet roll. Her face shrouded ahead of him, she clutches the disc and puts as much space between him and her back as possible to keep her heart from accelerating to a pace twice as fast.

It doesn't work. RJ chuckles, and they head to bed.

XXX

One narrator plays through static on the TV: "Now the peculiar shape of this fruit has sparked controversy among the religious community as of recent times - Why would God create bananas? With a take from Chesterton's Pastor Honey, me and Mr. Mono may have found our answer…"

"Uh, well, it's interesting, because uh, Jesus is believed to have been a big fan of bananas. And some say bananas look a bit like boomerangs- Well, uh, Jesus is like a boomerang, y'know, he always came back-"

RJ clicks the TV off. "This documentary stinks. I'm starting a banana church!"

On the purple throne of the TV set, hidden behind the fort of Team RPS, Heather lies resting on him. They're alone. Only minor traces of any others' watching and snacking can be found in the area. But life was slowly starting to return to be sure, after the neglectance of this sweet sound place last week. RJ's leaning his back over the armrest, and his body's in a mess of noodles with Heather, very innocently curled up over him with her head rubbed on his chest. Together though, it's far beyond a snug fit on the width of that chair. It's straight up squished. The longer RJ is awake, the number his back gets.

Heather has a banana peel on her head again. Goofball. With amusements like this RJ forgets the numbness anyway.

"At mass, every human has to feed Heather a banana. Then guess what? I'll never have to keep her stomach full again!"

He picks the slimy peel from between her ears and flings it onto a pile full of bananas eaten off one bunch. Even then her stomach rumbles in grievance and greed.

Perhaps more than her stomach craves more. In this nightly silence, where crickets chirp, he somehow can hear the music playing on and on, just by turning his head and looking at the CD on Heather's own rack. Through leafy vegetation and the green of the forest, he sees it somewhere back there, past the pond. The artificial colors of game boxes and of course, the CD rack, all for the purpose of storing their electronics and media. When the morning comes, Heather will open her bright eyes to match the tint of the sky, and they'd be off again. He'd make sure of it, just to experience the kid in this kid like that again.

"Oh don't start, I didn't ask you!" Who's he talking to? "I don't get her. I dunno why the kid's like this, but… this's clearly something special to her. She wants me to be a part of it, for some reason." All this talk is something that would make anyone else suspect RJ of dementia. "I mean yeah, the food's up there on the list. But we've got pleeenty, right?"

He visits two glaring pieces of evidence: the two forts, tall as the treetops, and the bandaged Mt. Feeds-a-Lot not too far away, now rising in comparative stature thanks to their efforts.

"And I for one think we've got PLEEENTY to show the girl. 'Heart foragers', the two of us. Whaddya think?"

His old raccoon plush, tattered and ripped, can't find a complaint for that, over there lifeless in the pitch-black grass.

"Any more objections?"

No objections found in its dead face.

"Good! Good. Night-night, you typical 'possum." RJ remembers those words from some time back. But it feels ironic, somewhat, with the cuddly aspect seemingly being the only thing typical about her… "Tomorrow, I've got a plan…"

Forget the whole cave thing - like, it's 95% full anyway. They're gonna fill that roll up by the end of the week. Start the timer; Start the music; Let's see where they can take this.

One final empty page left in RJ's journal, up to the challenge. The first CD he draws up becomes the exact same for Heather to catch the next morning, taking her turn spinning frivolously to score it on the banger roll. RJ nibbles excitedly on his pen for every CD she gets loaded, one-by-one. They all see their place in the journal. Every song, every memory, every one.

Somewhere not too far away, a coffee machine completes its dual-brew under the pink rising sun. Ozzie's barely awake in time to collect it with Stella before those alleged 'heart foragers' set out on their own suburban antics with no fair warning nor knowledge lent to him.

"Now where do you think she's off to, Stella?" Heather's tail disappears into the Hedge by the end of that sentence.

Stella sweeps up her coffee. "Feelin' a bit like Oz' today?"

"Is it too much like me? If I am going to die out there I'm going to die a worthy parent." Just a sniff has his paranoid claws gripping the air. "Heaven speaks, her donut breath?"

"Yea-uh?" From his entertaining overreaction, she snorts. "Donut breath?"

"Have you seen the kids when they eat that much sugar in the morning?" Then he slurps his caffeine-ridden coffee. "She has to know she's doing it; Those donuts… are never a good sign!..."

Stella keeps chuckling, watching him go. "Wut? Think the girl's up to… trouble?"

"That's it, I'm not going to let my daughter's sugar rush go unsupervised." Thus, he smacks his knees. "Legs; fatherly instincts, let's get to work!" He runs after them, managing his old breaths as well as he can.

"Hmph. Have fun."

All feels right, justified… until he arrives in the dead center of the suburbs, and car radios enclose his senses only on sound. Hideous, hideous sound that blocks his daughter's morning-donut-breath from his detection, and thus her safety along with it.

"I won't die… I won't die without her…"

XXX

Alright, cue the killer soundtrack composed by exactly one millennial dude in his basement. Or however it goes, and goes. They're gonna need it.

The Hedge? That thing's THEIR Hedge now. When they're through, they become new kinds of 'animals'. Between leaves, between yards, RJ and Heather surf the shade on their heisting mixtape. Hand-picked by Heather herself, every previous operation for literal food with the family has been replaced by the metaphorical food hoarded by only her and RJ. Two names, don't forget it. That big hunk of leaves becomes their worldly transit, for they experience nearly all cultures on their trip around the perimeter of the suburbs, from the most American of Americans (oh god) to lovely walks in Paris gardens.

It's heads and tails for them.

So, CD after CD. Scattered everywhere; Practically a game of hide-and-seek with what random locations they dig up. Behind houses. Under the feet of garden gnomes. Under some tall guy's tophat (who wears a tophat in the 2000s?). Around every nook and cranny, inside and out. RJ's packed the golf club to go. Now they're serious. They brought the whole dang wagon for their outing too. Halfway through the day they must've realized just how many CDs they could find by disregarding the food (not a painful struggle for RJ anymore, to be honest) and looking for these shiny circles.

And of course together as a team they trail the wagon behind them, hands on handle, side-by-side. And of course what that actually means is that RJ drags the thing while Heather lies back in the cart to 'organize' their stock. Every track she inspects gets placed into their respective 'cool' and 'not cool' piles, identified by smiley and frowny faces drawn on the discs.

And of course between every joust Heather needs a snack break. Let it be known, having fun is a very demanding occupation. Letting Heather HAVE fun is a very demanding occupation in itself, for RJ. How come it takes work to play?

But every time, they're back to Heather's 'work' not soon after. When she's having fun, it's not too hard for RJ to give in as well.

In that case, crank it up. Oh baby crank it up.

(To be a disclaimer, the following song names are fake; Any matching titles is purely coincidental.)

Men love trimming their own hedges. More importantly, they love listening to music when they do. 'My Dad Ate an Onion Ring' - BANGER track. Just like that, another score for the gang. The crew. The buddies. The, uh, what did RJ say? 'Heart foragers'? Yeah whatever. That sounds clunky. They're buddies. Heads 'n tails; Rock 'n Paper.

Another CD lying in a flower patch. 'Spare my Stomach'. Do these guys just leave these things sitting around outside? Easter's over, idiots. Come to think of it, why would a rabbit lay eggs anyway?

Why would a bird poop? Why would a bird… poop soap? The closest the Sniffer ever gets to grabbing their grabby parts is in some dusty attic where he unveils to them his lovecraftian horror, his LATEST INVENTION - robot surveillance birds (heard that one before) that poop soap on animals like them. Soapy bird poo. Let's not talk about it further, please no. Anyway, there's a CD somewhere in that attic too. 'Vending Machine Blues'.

As proud and omnipotent over the suburbs as their grip is now, RJ and Heather's shenanigans map themselves like a grid between houses and roads, up invisible hills and down their slopes.

Last but not least… they find time of course, to dunk their feet in cheese sauce and suck it off their toes. Each others'? Who knows. Who cares. And it's an ingenious deal they've got going on, and reassuring too, that Heather could never get rabies from him. That's just how super awesome and chill possums be. It's like they were made to be friends with peppy lunatics.

This rock n' roll ride of a lifetime, this niche 'foraging' event, whatever it may be, lines up and livens their spirits together, and dares Heather to be free.

But for every 'free' man or opossum, another feels in chains. So then there's Ozzie, taking the pain behind the scenes, and dying about a million deaths in the span of one day. A human adolescent throws a stick at his head. A beartrap clenches its jaws on his tail. Cars run right by without reservation, and for once he has to question how he ever managed to be hit by one in any place other than the wheels. For the family his path is clear. For Heather his vision shakes.

It cuts on its own just as often as he pulls the plug himself, instinct versus action. Witnessing her vulnerability running wild may be worse than watching it grow with her age. More daring, more dangerous, more lusting for the suburb's deliciously musical treasures which will one day swallow her whole like a wicked carnivorous chest.

Flailing herself at humanity. Busting into party after party, making herself an honorary attendee (thief), with less respect for her well-being around those humans than a suicide bomber. She's the soundtrack stealer with no rhythm to her mayhem. RJ's only promoting it!

So, between every move busted at parties and car lock picked from the lot… where's the Sniffer in all this? Behind the mischievous duo, he's chasing Ozzie, the tail end of it, and the exterminator assumes to be chasing the front.

The technology of the beast is only advancing. Faster drones. Smarter drones. They can identify and display to Ozzie a list of his characteristics so extensive it could straight up be used to dox: species, gender, height, weight, everything the Sniffer could detect with a smell already, plus Ozzie's last meal and an extensive scent trail marking his latest locations better than any smartphone or government can.

He's suffered it all so the two troublemakers can live privileged and free.

Not by his own will of course, for he assumes the dangers he faces could transfer to his daughter as simply as possible, and by all accounts he assumes he cannot be wrong. She avoids each peril a second before it arrives on him. Following the sprinkling, sparkling trail of their success, he picks up each crumb by the foot, from diamonds to disasters.

The backside of the willow tree, where they've set up their CD shop on a mere toilet roll turned into a mountain, RJ scribbles and scribbles for every CD Heather pulls from her tail like rings. When his journal's full he just throws it away. Just when this anxious fiesta may be over, they simply drape down a large roll of paper from the neighboring tree, and mark their recent finds there from the bottom up, and so it continues! They play a test run of just about every single CD on 'Heather's Banger Roll', almost half of them at once, in every single CD player they've got available. Beyond what they're playing out loud, they listen to select tracks by the headphones linking their heads together, 'just like old times', one might be saying.

Well if these are old times Ozzie HAS to be the young one! Every genre, every song echoes louder, crosses paths between his ears and through his hands when he so desperately tries to shut them. The music. THE MUSIC! It clogs his brain! The dancing and jamming and the drowning pleasure of it all, where he can't hear his daughter's voice or his own for that measure, nor the next!

All for what? Leisure? He faces liability! He catches her not once out there, but lingers close behind, close enough to see her escape the hell of humanity scot-free, not once feeling a prick with RJ while Ozzie is stabbed by pavement and plastic wonders again and again. A bird who cannot hatch the egg. He can only give it the warmth he cannot feel; hold its life full while his spills empty.

She will never know.

That's why now he's home, his head is throbbing, and still he hears it taunting from behind the willow tree.

Among the rest, Heather uncovers a CD smelling more foul than her fur after a garbage hunt. 'Best of Beethoven', it reads. That old guy's face on the cover looks nearly punchable. Underneath the dust and slop so fresh this thing could've been found in the garbage. "Yuck." She flings it away. "I don't even eat trash THIS bad."

She meant to land it in the pond, but it overshoots and touches down at Ozzie's feet on the other side. Interested, he takes it to save for himself. But once he picks it up, the music stops. A blessing? No. A warning. The two are absent from their places at the CD mountain, to be expected with this curse. Nothing's left but a CD player and those headphones.

He will now proceed to choose between this classical masterpiece and his daughter.

"YOU CAN WAIT, Beethoven!" He refuses to fall to any backtalk from the disc, as a true heroic father would. "I will NOT be left in the dust of MY DAUGHTER's life! But we'll talk again…"

He retreats from his brief cozy silence to go back after them… again. Through night and day.

XXX

And so, after a whole day and a half of dad-mode-ing…

He remembers a fiery patch of orange-red flowers near the place he uncovers her.

It takes him until one day's supper to pin Heather down beyond the Hedge, the suburbs, the crossroads that mark the rushing river between the old world of humanity and the new, in construction.

Amidst jackhammers and clomping humans he searches for her in the dusty place. Only a couple weeks in and already houses are gridded in rows, but nothing between them is complete - His feet only cross over soil shaken so loose it may be pure sand. Of course, everything is barren of vegetation. Everything that was once grass stripped away, along with everything resembling the sort. It's an unusual place to find her daughter, an alleyway up the sides of houses without purpose - lifeless walls.

He sees her tail first, flicking innocently about. Gray fur, then, lost in the confusion of white, orange and tainted brown, in what should be glowing over green.

Free at last from his ethereal chains of regret and lost promise, free at last! The very sight of her makes him gasp with joy. Joy, the wondrous emotion, sweetly emphatic for pleasure, the light in the tunnel.

It dies. It happens when he removes the mountain of that tunnel. A bulldozer storms up the alley in their direction, endangering her before him, collecting rubble and other scraps of unused material. The frontal blade spans the width of the lane, slaughtering any chance of escape. Except for the slim intersections up and down the row, which Heather appears too naive, too innocent, to take into account. In fact, she hardly notices the dozer at all, staring up the tan wall of a new house, listening and attentive to someone or something, but not speaking a word.

Two opossums reside in this alley. It will not shrink to one!

Ozzie runs.

"I won't die…"

Heather gets it in the corner of her eye as an image enlarging to a harrowing scale. "Oh." She squirms squealishly to face it.

"I won't die!"

Ozzie's huffs pick up enough to clog his throat.

The corner of the bulldozer's blade tramples across a slick window pane leaning against one of the new houses, waiting to be installed. It doesn't stop at all to get jammed - It shatters the glass to sharp bits, good-as-new to good-as-dead.

Heather fidgets. "Eee…"

"I won't die without her!"

Ozzie refuses to let his breaths stay uneven, so he grits and molds them together into one, before his oxygen cuts.

The distance shrinks to a few feet, between his daughter and the claws of frightening reality slashing any settlement into a realm fit for the jungle.

Heather turns to the wall for help. She calls for a savior from the name of another sounding nothing like him. "RJ!"

"Grab on, I got your back!" A fishing line and toy hook come down from the roof for her to latch her tail onto.

At the same time Ozzie lunges his caring arms forth to save her, her tail is hoisted into the sky. She disappears as he most feared she would, unexpected though in manner.

"Nnnno!" he cries before stumbling forth and bashing his head into the center of the blade as an arrow to a shield. It thumps with a rusty metallic ring that swirls and drowns in his ears. What does he do? He dies, out of instinctive trauma or conscious fear, likely the latter, for he feels his forehead throb throughout his brain.

At the same time Ozzie's limp body gets dozed away, RJ and Heather laugh on top of that roof. Cutting it close really gets the blood pumpin'. It does not get them to notice his existence any more than a fly on the wall.

A bump over raw dirt lifts Ozzie off his back. In the blade of the bulldozer he's cradled, then cradled by himself. Glass and wood and metal - his new friends - irk him too much, so he rolls out at the next chance he finds.

RJ and Heather laugh. Their humor floats in the air before zipping at Ozzie's face one at a time to prolong the torture, and embarassement, and shame. The belittling punch they pack targets his dirty sack self of a dad so quick it's nearly convincing enough to assume they laugh at him. They do not. Certainly Heather hasn't even acknowledged her father yet. He pounds at the ground, sticks his full muzzle into it, and groans at the aching throughout his muscles and now on his head. His body and brain face the failure of himself. Heather's still alive, however, so Ozzie scales the outside of a gutter on his way to her.

RJ and Heather sunbathe together on the sizzling roof, with pairs of black shades and sun reflectors at the ready.

Suffering a giant bruise, Ozzie barely manages himself onto the roof. "Hea- Heaven speaks, oh, my LEGS have given in! My FATHERLY INSTINCTS gone dry! I AM…" He crashes. "...elderly."

To check who arrived, as bored of a sight Ozzie comes to him, RJ lifts his head up only for a second. "Mmmeh."

Heather does it too. "Mmmeh."

"Oh, oh lord-y…" Ozzie wheezes. They ignore his asthmatic, dying condition, motionless. "What are you two doing out so far?"

They don't flinch, but continue to feel the glorious rays of the sun bless their fur. Even on his deathbed they wouldn't care to pull down their blinds to watch him go. Simply, he will. Ozzie clears his throat very mildly. Nothing happens. So he goes and peaceably tips down Heather's sun reflector.

Because of his intrusion, she's forced to move her shades down at least one generous inch, but unmoved beyond that. "Wwwhat?"

"I talked to the family this morning. The others are worried about you two, going out like this repeatedly without warning!"

"…How come I haven't heard about any of this?" Why hasn't she heard about any of this? It's been nearly two days and no one's spoken to her, no one's broken the mold, ruined her beat, except for him. No breaks, no interruptions - somehow her memory draws a complete blank on whatever he's talking about, and she shows it in her befuddled glance.

"We've tried to get you to hear! Each time you return we've tried to stop you, but you're already off with him again. They find it troubling with the Sniffer out and about, and whatever other dangers lie out here. And if I may speak for myself, I do too."

"Yeah, like we don't totally PLAN these things. Right, RJ?"

So the rewind hits in Ozzie's brain back to the dead center of the suburbs. He's able to picture exactly everything Heather now mentions as if he lived it himself, and well, he did, as a spectator confined to rosebuds and spiky bushes.

...

To his terror, RJ and Heather cross the street without caution, somehow having collected enough luminous CDs already to turn Heather's tail into a glorified hat rack.

"Hey, did you know somethin' like 8.3 MILLION 'possums become roadkill each year?" Heather casually chats with him.

"Good luck faking THAT death."

An obnoxious engine rattles like an earthquake in Ozzie's ears. Trapped behind glass, Ozzie watches in horror as a rich red car comes storming up the street at them.

In the presence of RJ and Heather however, it screeches to a halt as they stand and watch, erected in place. The front license plate is just inches from Heather's nose. Heather starts to brew up a sneeze from the polluted dust blown into her nostrils, but the car already backpedals up the street into oblivion at the speed of a jet engine before her itty sneeze can even propel it.

"Luckily you are SO repulsive they won't even try," RJ claims.

"Wait, am I cute or repulsive? Like, you're the kinda guy whose shallow insults sound like flirting for some reason."

"Repulsively cute."

...

"Y'know why that car didn't hit me, unlike you? Because I am totally awesome, dad," Heather proudly points. "That's my plan."

"…That's… a plan?" Ozzie tests.

"Yep. Like, my sheer awesomeness aura will overcome ALL evil. Just like mom said."

"You weren't even old enough to remember her-"

"It's a headcanon, DAAAD," comes her snarky, impeccable sitcom-esque delivery. Imagine a laugh track just happened because it ain't happening otherwise. "I bet she was super hot too, you're just embarrassed to admit it-"

"I've warned you befooore, you should NOT be speaking of your BEAUTIFUL, loving and WHOLESOME mother like that-"

"Anyway, can you like…" Her head nudges towards RJ, cool as a raccoon popsicle in a freezer. Hopefully he'd get the gist. "…leave us alone, dad?"

"You've been alone for a day and a half!" Every shiver and chatter intensifies his urge to wrap his arms around her just to console himself. The inability… the inability… has him squeal, "Oh I say it's a blessing I was even able to keep up with you two well enough to KNOW you weren't dead on the streets or something awful."

Heather's brow furrows abruptly. As well as he's 'kept up with her' allegedly, he poorly fairs cutting the distance she repels herself from him in a provoked reaction. "Eww, dad, you were STALKING us for a day and a half?!"

"No no, stalking is malicious intent. This is parental supervision-"

RJ breaks in, at last. "Oooooo-kayyy, are you two in the Issues household gonna be at this for a while? I'm sunbathing in peace, thank you."

Heather's face cringes up behind the silver screen, but makes guilty contact with Ozzie's distress. RJ cracked into the conversation like lightning. Suddenly she undergoes an intense headache forcing her to part with the rain to address the thunder. Her tail returns a look she gives it.

"Why don't you come back to the Log with me?" Ozzie proposes out of colossal exhaustion, "With us? So we all can stop worrying?"

"Why, dad? Why can't I just have fun, y'know?"

"Because I need you to think of me!" he argues louder then. "And the family!"

She's not taking any of it. She's thinking of RJ, and filling her cheeks with an outburst of air filtered through him. "Dad, WHY DON'T YOU, like- Oh jeez… Dad, can I have like, 5 more minutes?" She forces herself to spew it out tamely: "Pppplease?"

"This place is dangerous and it'll only get worse, Heather. I believe the whole Hammy situation proved just that. And I care too much about you." Clearly so. "Without cover we are more prone to attack-"

Heather terrorizes Ozzie's paranoid ears when she whistles, "DROOOONE!"

"No problemo!" goes RJ. He shoots the Sniffer's drone down with a toilet plunger loaded in a wooden crossbow.

"SOAPY BIRD POO!"

"Say no more." A heavy-duty shield works just fine.

"See? See, dad? Just chiiiill. Me 'n RJ, we got a plan for anything," Heather assures him.

No one has time to plan a reaction. A wrecking ball veers in and crushes Heather past the brick roof into the attic kept behind it, demolishing everything in the way. The ball tears a crooked line through the entire slant of the roof. Bricks fly everywhere like shrapnel. Miraculously none of it hits RJ or Ozzie. Heather's been clobbered out of existence by a wrecking ball. Struck several feet from Ozzie, but he dies from the blow anyway.

"OH MY GOD that house's STILL an inch off, Jerry!" Jack Sawood, the head of construction, shouts unreservedly between the picture-perfect street and this house's dizzy position. "HOW MANY INCHES DO YOU NEED TO SCREW UP-?!"

A woman very sternly reminds him, "Sir, you haven't taken your antidepressants today-"

"I KNOW-!" He breathes in deep and sends dead butterflies out his nostrils. "Whatever. Take 'em down. Or… whatever."

"Oh no no no!" Beside the rubble left of the roof, his only daughter's sure grave, Ozzie collapses to his knees. "The show doesn't end here! Not like THIS!" He sends his voice at the wrecking ball and beyond into the heavens: "GREAT BLACK BALL of calamity, why do you CURSE MEEEEEEE-!?"

When the ball flops itself out, Heather's only planted into a Heather-sized hole pressed in soft, pink insulation in the back of the empty attic, where she's suffered no broken bones - Maybe her muzzle bended a little, for a second.

"I get kicked into walls (so) all the time, getting pounded isn't much worse."

"Oh," goes Ozzie. He bows. "I thank the humans for stuffing their walls with pink cotton candy."

The two stare at him.

"Dad?" Heather starts.

"Yes Heather?"

"Stop being all weird."

Ozzie sighs, ends his act, and says to RJ, "So… what are you two doing out so far?"

Of course, as his dad senses guessed, RJ shows him the boombox somewhere on a table, with a CD track audible.

"Now we're just waiting for the pinnacle of opportunity this blessed world gifts us," RJ declares. "Trust us Oz-man, we got a plannn."

He puts it simply. "RJ, this is too far."

"C'mon 'Oznie', how often 'doth one get clobbered by a second wrecking ball in thou day'?"

A second ol' clobber of the wrecking ball makes a near miss in the attic's beams next to Heather. The whole world quakes and teeters in response.

"Heather-"

"Nope." She gets back to chilling with RJ. The sun reflector flaps up even higher over her face to block Ozzie from her page for good.

Ozzie carries his parental authority soft, and gentle against her, rather so, for "Please LISTEN to me, Heather-!" sounds more like-

'Please LiStEn to me, Heather'- Pfft. She holds her phone out for dad to see and plays the lowest-quality homemade audio footage of Ozzie's titanic snores anyone will ever hear.

Finally, Ozzie prepares a vigilant approach - rips the sun reflector right away from her. "Heather!"

Heather points into the distance and lets out an absolutely horrific scream. "Dad, Heather's gonna die!"

Ozzie grasps his chest and flips around. Some birds in the horizon chirp beautifully at him. He shoots his head back. RJ and Heather are notably absent from their sunglasses.

"CHA-HOOOOOO!" There's RJ, somewhere close enough to hurt Ozzie's ear.

Ozzie's head shoots back, again. RJ and Heather jump straight off the edge of the roof. They both land on a white styrofoam plane placed on top of a large slide set up in the incomplete backyard. As large as it is, they take to either wing. A bump to the toy plane rides it down the slide before hitting the ramp at the bottom and launching them into the sky to take flight.

"Later, dad!" Heather hollers wildly. They're off into the stratosphere. "We're stealin' ARNIE'S!"

Another wrecking ball swing comes right at him. In panic, Ozzie too spins and leaps off the roof into the yard, and takes note of their trajectory, going over the crossroads and over the span of the established suburbs in the complete opposite direction from their home. Watching them abruptly leave into the horizon as if they'd anticipated him and set up this escape route, why, he clings his hands to his head and screams more girlishly than Heather just did.

He runs as fast as he can back to the Log. Hammy as well watches the big white plane go over the suburbs in awe, which is the only thing stopping him from sneaking a drink of soda.

Ozzie saves the can, or steals it, as he goes by and chugs it down to pep up every muscle in his body. He's ready to chase the plane through the Hedge and into the suburbs until he takes out Stella like a bull towards a red cape. The coffee cup in her hand flies away and pours into the dirt, wasted. They both flail their limbs over each other on the ground.

"Oz', WATCH IT!" Home sweet home; Stella lashes out at the mat. "If you spilled my coffee I'll spill your blood! I'LL SPILL YOUR BLOOD, MAN-!"

Ozzie, as a robot, picks her up and sticks her feet on the ground, facing the styrofoam plane so she can catch a glimpse for herself.

"Is that-?"

Ozzie, a major lump of worry in his throat, ends her thought with a frantic nod.

Hammy comes up to them casually, just to scratch his head. "Hmm, well that's weird, Heather said she was gonna go doorbell pushing with me after I bothered her enough about it."

"We also promised tonight would be our game night," Ozzie explains. "Um… I think I'm gonna have to call that off."

"Wo-ow! How forgetful…"

Hammy doesn't give it a second thought, picking up his 'Innuendo DS' console to amuse himself. But Stella follows Ozzie as he hurdles to the willow tree around the pond.

Ozzie tears the leaves out. On the ground… there's a large sheet of poster paper with doodles covering it. He goes over and leans down to follow along with their 'plan' for this event. An airplane to the sky - that part's complete. They travel miles over the suburbs - one fall means death - underneath commercial airliners and bird flocks clogging the route. Destination? Arnie's. Infested with hungry, angry humans.

Once Stella catches up, that poster paper has Stella bumping her hip at him. "What's the fuss? Ev-i-dently they have a plan."

If that were meant to console him, it only thrusted the opposite feeling. Ev-i-dently they knew what destruction they were getting into. He falls onto his knees and puts his hands over his eyes.

"I am going to die…"

The pure white plane busts through the clouds, but dives swiftly into the troposphere again as a dolphin. A dolphin. This doesn't quite express the maniacal panic seemingly shared by RJ and Heather as they have shared a single pair of earbuds across the thin body of the plane. They contain their own panic to either individual wing, but share it over the line between their ears, sourced from a phone gripped tightly in Heather's hand.

"SHINEDOWN!" RJ urges in a list. "BACKSTREET BOYS! Gimme Ben FOLDS! Anything, 'possum pal, ANYTHING?"

Heather's finger mushes harder and harder on the screen of the phone, scrolling faster. "Uhhh…"

'Aerosmith'. 'Aerosmith'. 'Aerosmith'. Under every song in the playlist, and identical in thumbnail.

"UHHH…" Heather scrolls faster than she can comprehend each song title. That album thumbnail flashes fanatically, over and over.

RJ leans crookedly over the edge of the plane into the far, far horizon. "UGH. We've still got 10 miles." He massages his temples. "Just start up that auto-generated playlist. It's A.I. It's gotta know what we're into."

"But that's got that angsty guy whose jacket smells like old toothpaste!"

He jerks his head to her and bares his teeth. "AND HOLY MOLEY WE'RE INTO IT!"

Now she has to press it, by the hesitant tap of a button. Nothing but the wind accompanies their silence then. The randomized song begins, acoustic and nostalgic in tune. RJ draws a blank. Heather seems to recognize it immediately.

It bubbles them in, like a blue sheet wraps the sky, and the sea. Free from trouble, a literal skyscraper's worth of height departs them from worry, from Ozzie, from anyone to sour their vibe. By 'their' it mostly implies Heather, abrupted more by the change and fading chains than RJ, who is merely an audience at the moment. He's left reality too, but sits on the wing, while Heather fully arises and bathes in vast sunlight.

"Wait, I know this song!" she says.

"Is it the kinda edgy song I'd have to call your dad over? The kind the humans would call - I'm just taking shots here - questionable?"

Edgy? With the strum of an acoustic guitar like that? "Nah, this was during his reforming phase…" Right. "Oh sick, I could totally sing this!"

Her feet ease towards the ledge, excited by itty wonder. The grass never looked greener from up here, even though by now she'd seen it all, thanks to RJ. The sun watches with her, omnipresent, preparing a fine shine through any sparse, grumpy clouds and over the land.

RJ scales her up and down. "Call it bluff, she is actually gonna totally sing this. Wasn't expecting that."

Their freeway's clouded below by a magnificent forest of kites flown by younglings into the sky.

Heather's singing voice actually… engages RJ now that he hears it unsheathed. It draws him in; It skims him over the tip of the water, just to pull him under. That's the magic of Heather's singing voice. Every word, pitch, and dynamic is enlivening and rich with energy, but precise and articulated. She's wild to her own control, never backing down an inch, singing only out of her heart and soul instead of the mouth. And even on a smooth string like this, her voice sends upbeat fanfares to the clouds, for it sounds oh so free. So she sings. Freely.

(Heather)

I've never been looking quite down be-fore,

I bet it's a curse to be livin' on the floor,

Like, who ever said to show the sun your back,

When the sky don't hold no enemies that will attack?

Believe it or not, she's replicating the song exactly. RJ can tell, and finds immense fascination in her. But she'd never recited this. At least he never heard it. Her immersiveness with the song grows with his of her, spinning and bobbing and bouncing and working every limb and muscle to express her whole body, and get that tail shakin'. Her hands fidget with themselves too. On the white of this plane, pure as the heavens, she glows brighter than its surface.

Well I'm up, I'm down, most days I'm rockin' in betwee-ee-een!

Have I found the sun's chance to make a star of me…?

She glances over, winks, and wiggles her tail at RJ before continuing to the chorus:

Show the world what's at your back, sun baby!

Show the world what's at your back, sun baby.

Show the world some shade 'n nighttime, baby,

I'm already alive!

What was once forest transforms before her eyes into the suburbs there now, as she sings. Such a boring, repetitive palette of trees remove themselves and shape into a palette of rooftops. Still repetitive, sure, but anyone's a fool for judging outer appearances. Within each house there's a new adventure, and new food for her insatiable hunger. Her stomach nearly rumbles. Her heart too. No matter what Verne or whoever could say, the suburbs were no home, but it surely was the world, full of mysteries and surprises.

Show the world what's at your back, sun baby!

Show the world what's at your back, sun baby.

Show the world I've got your back, sun baby,

I've been glowin' so bri-i-i-ight!

She ends up leaving the young man to carry on. The high winds take place in her left ear. These gusts enrichen her fur, that which RJ humbly abides to commit his entire plane of thought. They must also be treating her avid gusto to the song of the silent, for the oddly soft-spoken breath of a child - a tender child - comes through her, rather than that vibrant, singing predecessor: "The toothpaste guy came up with it in a dream. Sick, right?"

"That's the kinda stuff you're into?" RJ intrigues loudly after he finds his own words again, being in company that strung them more vibrantly than he ever could.

"Dude, music's like a buffet to me. Some's sweet, some's sour, some's like, SUSPICIOUSLY meaty for some reason, but in the end, I'm eating all of it." She stretches her mouth back and squints a bit in abhorrence. "Except that one weird plate they've got that no one actually touches but always seems to run out anyway."

"You are pretty soft in the heart…" he mutters. "Okay sure, also, I know I've already heard it (I'm sorry), but um… You've got a good voice. Seriously, go DO something with those vocal cords, girl!"

"Eh thanks, but I don't really sing, like, in FRONT of people, y'know?"

"Why not?"

"Look, I… just sing sometimes, okay? No crowd, no pressure…"

"Then what's even the point?"

"The-... Huh. That's crazy, I dunno WHY I do it. Whatever, just PLE-ASE don't catch me singing about something embarrassing again…" That's where she draws the end of her interest, sticks her toes over the edge of the wing and hums to her wholesome rhythm.

Well if she wanted to sing about Arnie's again, he'd let her go right ahead. They're halfway to the restaurant.

Her tail continues wagging back and forth, swaying close to RJ every other beat. For some reason it energizes his eyebrows, lifts them slightly up. The wind comes over too, which her tail fans to him to share. RJ glances at the owner as she perches over the scenery, taking to every garden and yard and bouncy house to satisfy herself with the world RJ swung her high above.

The air is so fresh today, as though she could fly away. They almost feel dominant, even, at this height, where they feel more god than mortal, as if they built this world rather than resided within its dome.

But all that, all that curiosity she shows distracts him. Her metronome tickles at him every other beat.

"P.S., your tail's still doing the uh, the thing-" Heather hears him point out.

"Song's still going in my head, dude." She ruffles her skull vigorously. "If I don't have a beat to follow, my BRAIN, my RAISIN BRAIN just gets all messed up. Meanwhile the tail kinda does whatever it wants, all finicky 'n stuff. I call it the 'happy tail'."

But in addition to that, her happy tail wasn't the only thing being finicky. RJ watches her toes rap against the wing and her head subtly bob around. Her body and mind seem to house and prolong the music they just heard, and invest themselves entirely in it. Every time the rhythm latches onto her, it becomes her strength. There's something so juvenile about it, but oddly mature as well, to be able to contain such a 'finicky' beat as consistently as she is now. Every movement gets replicated exactly, over and over without end. And while it goes on, she's keenly observant to the world below, her senses regulated by an endless playlist inside her head. Her sights are attracted to every distinct color, as RJ sees it, fancifully keeping track of their gradients and patterns.

Her tail treads closer to RJ's side and taps against his arm repeatedly. He snatches the tip of it loosely, just to tease it for a response. It rips free and slaps him hard across the cheek.

XXX

Ozzie crunches his legs in when bombing his seat onto a black pillow in the lounge. He may be under the trees, but their shade only replaces the heat with dim, cold spirits instead of comfort. He puts his whole weight on that pillow, and rocks back and forth by his shaky knees. Stella just stares at him cradling himself like a baby.

"What if she…" Ozzie takes his hand from his lips to start. "No, what if… OH I can't bear to imagine, Stella! What if the wind tore through their plane wings, and she's now plummeting at a HUNDRED meters a second towards the earth? Before her itty bitty body hits the ground dead, and-... AND-... and I have no means against it, oh, why!?"

Meanwhile, RJ and Heather are busy reenacting (THE) part from Titanic on the front of the plane, unknown to him.

"Look, you need sum pills or somethin' man," Stella tells Ozzie. "But it don't sound like there'd be no pill for YOUR… problem."

"I'm sor-ry, I just-" He must be haunted, the way he jerks his head as painfully as he does.. "UGHHH, I cannot STAND it! When are they getting back?"

"They'll get back when they get back! Don't die on it, man." Out somewhere else, she yells, "TIG'UH! How many minutes we got left on that soppy slop show, huh?"

She's gone.

Ozzie sits there.

And he sits, and watches.

The wind blows. One crooked branch creaks over him as the blue umbrella over the lounge does fwoop. A yellow dandelion, that he could reach to pet if he wanted to, takes some psychological blow that cripples its stem and saddens its shape. That's interesting. Then a black bird flies somewhere far over the Hedge, and crashes VIOLENTLY into a second-story window, as a plane to a mountain peak, so Ozzie's legs are alerted, the instinct kicks in, and he runs.

That soda can Hammy's about to collect off the ground again becomes Ozzie's to steal, and he's bolting towards the Hedge. "Thanks Ham-MYYYYYYY!"

"You're WELCOME! Have a GOOD VACATION!" Hammy calls. "Maybe Ozzie'll bring back a souvenir from Paris."

Not a second after that moment, RJ and Heather's screams imitate the sounds of a combusting engine. The big white plane crashes above Hammy's head, tearing through branches and making unsubtle cracks through the treeline. They're already back with takeout to boot.

Ozzie isn't too thrilled to be crawling, crippled, on his way back through the Hedge.

"So, did you meet any lovely ladies on your trip, nudge-nudge?" Hammy asks.

He almost goes dead. As painful of a sight the styrofoam plane in front of him already is, of course the blaring white hue of the monstrosity has to sting a blinding absorption of sunlight straight into his eyes and burn them from the inside out. Ozzie's knees may be crippled, but his head becomes more involved in the show than ever. It's still a show, right? His thoughts rubble to defy it. They grow and throb his brain. Rattling teeth and nails like a sonic boom.

An entire glass dome of sanity blows to pieces in his head.

"No," Ozzie almost sobs. "But my KNEES are about to… meet their grave."

RJ and Heather help each other up from the fall.

"Where've they been?" Tiger comments to Verne, both bystanders even further settled in the background.

Verne shakes his head. "Who knows."

"I don't believe they know quite where their home is. What is a home for one who never visits? And not family either, for they're stuck to themselves, like two plump… delicious fish in a salted sandwich-"

"You said you were on your diet, Tiger."

"I am. I apologize."

In that mess RJ and Heather retrieve their three-course meal of Arnie's, complete with awesome fish burgers (that Heather could sing about) and a 9-piece-premium-deluxe-limited-edition-barbeque-barn-blast-dino-sponsored box of chicken nuggets. They're headed to the willow - what's become their headquarters essentially - right away.

And Ozzie doesn't even try to stop her by this point. He's tossed an iced latte from Arnie's anyway, just to rub salt in the wound.

In a rush, Heather says, "Hi dad. Bye dad. Bye dad."

"What was the 2nd one for?" RJ interrogates. "And why are you bribing him with lattes?"

"I'm not talking to him..."

Hammy watches Heather rush past him as well. He holds a stolen, old and degraded doorbell, scratched and tattered by its neglectance of attention. "Remember doorbells, Heather?" He hammers the button over and over. It makes a lifeless noise. "DOORBELLS?! They're loud and obnoxious, y'know, kinda like me!... Heather!" When she refuses to acknowledge it, he throws it away.

Heather's feet stop. Climbing up her totally stressed arm, she turns to find Hammy.

"Now can we go doorbell pushing?" he asks as a charming kid would.

His innocence purged from her mind, it takes no effort to reject the idea at this time, when a billion cars are jammed on her highway of polluted stress from one look at her dad. "Hammy… Just gimme a minute, please…"

She tosses him to his waiting bench. In response, his bottom lip bulges a mile out. Denial, loneliness - they grow his saddened eyes to the size of moons.

For some reason, with his latte, Ozzie can't find any words to speak, but sits on the empty floor. Something about her softens his soul as she departs, back turned, and the lost bond tugging by the broken end of a string.

He ponders curiously as one does hand-to-chin: "I'm her father! Why do I feel like I have no authority against this!?" He sips at the latte to job his mind on the matter.

Stella's out here laughing when she trots over his feet, ruffling the hair on his head. "Imagine what'd happen if they went in blind."

Blind, she says, but he presumes they never will be. The way they celebrate over the pond, adding a glittering CD to their wealthy stash, one they must've picked up at Arnie's - it speaks awareness to him. 'Heather's Banger Roll' is filled and there's enough they've hoarded to fill a million more. When they go in without a plan, they will know. Just like Heather's donut breath. As fresh of a spirit as the family does over every heist they complete together, they compliment each other as one. Just these two though, over such a baby step of a victory, they make it look more intimate. They can't tell praise apart from sarcasm, even though it has to be all the former. They know what they're doing. He can tell by a righteous ring in the voices. And that makes his ears fear they'll know they won't know what they're doing. There's a hint of danger in this party they have, their lives held by a thread, waiting for one degree hotter of a threatening flame to burn it off.

"It will be disastrous. I'll see before I doubt just this."

When it becomes calm behind the willow, and their ever-growing electronic collection has skewed to be 50% audial, RJ and Heather briefly gaze upon the claimed mountain with pride. Until RJ catches a look from Ozzie somewhere nearby, close to their team's food fortress - an impressive feat of its own staked in the pair's history.

"Wowie, really dodged that bullet back there, didn't ya?" RJ points out while digging through a bag of fast food.

Spoiling her mood, she pouts her arms together and taps her foot with a red flush of tension over her. "I already know what dad's gonna say. Why bother?"

"I'm sure he has a point with these things…" he feels the need to shrug and acknowledge. "Just… not a great one. Eh, why do I care, it's your daddy issue, not mine."

A pond's length of distance between them, behind Ozzie's back, literally, she munches vigorously on her giant custom-made (custom-stolen) fish sandwich and gossips: "Has he always been this… defensive? And my tummy's been too full o' Wacky Whip to SEE it?"

Ozzie acts the same, though he does not spread his dissatisfaction to any other. He sits alone on the other side, slurping vigorously on the bribing latte, and asking himself, "Has she always been quite so… negligent of this danger? And I've been too full of myself to FEEL it?"

Ozzie gracefully flings his empty cup over the pond, landing at Heather's side.

Heather hurls her empty sandwich box up and away, landing at Ozzie's side.

They both take one vicious bite of each container. They feed off tough plastic and rough cardboard to add crunch to their troubles.

"Anyway, wanna go start a GoFundMe or somethin'?" Heather throws at RJ.

"Might as well, 'cause we didn't have enough dollars lying around to buy that rubber duck army from a while back, did we?

They're up to amuse themselves. "Oh, yeah that too. I just meant getting people's pity money sounds like a good way to de-stress."

"De-stress from what? YOU DIDN'T EVEN TALK TO HIM, HEATHER!"

Ozzie heads to the bulletin board next to Verne's fort and anxiously counts down the days to Heather's birthday on the calendar.

Conveniently enough, Verne comes along to keep track too. The map of the construction pinned right beside it, routed through their home, which Verne takes greater, sadder interest in. RJ's taken not a single glance at the issue since the start of the week. If Ozzie's here, that must mean Heather hasn't taken any glance at their own.

So Verne wanders near. Ozzie stands out among the world of the wild. Opossums do. A mixture of light and dark clouds in the middle of murk and mud. Ambivalent by nature they wear a kind of mask more subtle than the raccoon's. One that can be greatly appreciated when seen through, as Verne sees through his. There's something more to him - the pink under his fur. Verne slightly tucks up his shell to conceal more of his own self when he introduces himself to this jack-in-the-box of a character.

"Can I join you?" Verne solemnly asks.

"Please, please do. Worrying alone is quite uncomfortable."

"You carry truth, Ozzie. Truth… and really manly whiskers."

"Thank- thank you, I got that a lot in my twenties."

"Go on."

It seems together they'd be counting the whole night long.

ACT III: Heather's BIG Moment

Verne's dragged into the suburbs far before sunrise the next morning. Street lights remain lit to brighten his entrance, but not a single living soul more. An absent breeze would help to stir more in this mannequin place. Maybe a touch or two over his eyebrows hinting at life, only to never provide. Bushes are dark in the ominous morning - even the Hedge he wanders from stretches darkness over him, before a few steps enter him into the open, flat roadway.

Sounds flutter by here and there. Cars of families leave home for the day at the crack of dawn. Humans abandon their own homes, and animals like RJ take the chance to move in, whom Verne is after. "Um, RJ?" he whispers as he skitters houses, holding a sticky note. "R-JJJJJ… I'm not sure what 'Be ready for a duck maelstrom' is supposed to MEAN, RJJJJ… Are the ducks a metaphor?!"

Rather than anything climatic, Verne finds RJ hammering away on a laptop between two rose bushes against the front of a house.

The guy finishes typing and sighs hugely. "Verne, my good man… I have considered this notion deeply… and now, I have a confession to make."

"So you actually listened to me?" he gasps out of shock prior to any other reaction. "Back- Back in the forest?! The start of the week!? Wow… RJ's listening to me…" He smiles and crumples the note. It falls to the floor before he chooses to let it loose from his palm. It just does. Across days and nights, Verne built a collection of scraps - lost hopes of RJ's actions. That bucket pours out, opening his heart again. "RJ, I just have to say… I still don't know what the duck maelstrom implies… but I am proud you're finally changing your ways. We'll need your leadership to keep the Log safe-"

"Me 'n Heather bought rubber ducks with all our GoFundMe money." Shut eyes and squared shoulders. RJ breaks in quickly like he really is confessing a truth.

"W-What?" Not even a bucket would slurp up its vomit, so it leaves its stomach empty and confused.

"Verne… I know you were expecting better of me. Why rob some poor saps of their pity money for rubber ducks?"

"RJ this isn't what I was talking about-"

He admits this too: "We didn't make enough from the GoFundMe. So now we're about to go campaigning too."

Verne blinks rapidly. After a grave misunderstanding on his part, sour to his throat, he can't move his eyes anywhere off RJ. "Cam-... Campaigning."

"That's right, Verne!" RJ announces. "CAM-PAIGNIIIIiiing- Ohhh hold on, Heather's eating a donut."

Heather comes spiraling down the nearest street lamp by one hand and foot, carrying a big pink donut in her tail through the ring. "Hi, I'm eating a donut."

'Eating a donut' pounds the entire thing into her open jaw, swallowed whole, leaving a wall of icing where her lips once were. She jumps off next to RJ.

"CAMPAIGNING!" they announce together.

Two critter-sized shirts plummet over their heads, and the signs they bring out as well ring their new ulterior 'save the environment' incentive for their rubber duck purchasing. By all definitions the two of them are a part of nature, to be fair; These things are never more than partly a lie.

But from passing cars they're only slobbered on by stale chips and half-eaten taquitos. RJ chucks his wooden sign to leave a dent in the side of the next poor passerby, hurting more in the end than his campaign would help.

"Darn road rats! We're not ANIMALS! We're POLITICIANS! Take us SERIOUSLY!" RJ rumbles. "The future of our planet WILL have rubber ducks in it! Now GIVE me power!"

The humans throw a whole uneaten banana at Heather's forehead, too. Heather faces the same anger, kicking it into the street. But then, catastrophe. A speeding car runs that living soul over, exploding it through the peel, spilling its guts, transforming the banana into a gory mess of sad yellow roadkill.

Both gasp. RJ and Heather place themselves in the road to salute the fallen warrior. RJ gets out a depressed trumpet to blow. Heather brings out her solemn tail, holds it to her heart and droops her ears. They will never allow another prosperous youngling to have their life full of potential claimed by these streets again.

Verne's ready to kick himself out there too. "Okay, I think you two have had a liiiittle too much fun for today."

They return to him. "Whaddya sayin'?" RJ spouts.

"Just quit wasting time!"

"Oh yeah? What have you got done?"

On top of a roof, RJ and Heather are able to stare at Verne's fort - a REAL fortress at this point, not even a title - at least triple the height of the brick beast they stand on, across the suburbs and over the Hedge. Visibly, it's been upgraded with a militaristic set of food defenses and extended balconies and rooftop battlements.

"Hi Uncle RJ!" the three porcupine kids holler from the top of that… thing.

"Hi Cousin Heather!" Bucky calls. "We stole your phone!"

"We've been taking vids of your snoring dad!" Spike tells her. A post like that makes the optimal camera spot.

"Woah, look, I think he's even drooling right now!" Quillo announces, on top of the world.

"Ew," Heather says.

RJ flicks a hand atop the house, unimpressed. "Oh please, I could build a Lego set twice that size in an hour or two. Nope. Rookie build."

Verne's sheer presence basically yanks them back to ground level. "RJ, we don't have time to worry about rubber ducks, or… those little green sheets of paper those humans print. What're they even worth? It's paper."

"Well, ya got one thing right," RJ says. "I find half our money behind public toilets; They can't be worth that much."

"I'm pretty sure one time RJ said it hypnotizes their brains," Heather explains. What's that paper even worth? Paper… she gets an idea. "Wait, RJ, we're stupid."

"And?"

"I'm sayin' like, y'know, why don't we just print our own money?"

"I… don't think that's how it works," Verne utters.

But anyway, RJ takes a dollar from a friendly printer hooked up in the nearest yard (that just happens to be handy). "Works for me." He pops open a dollar slot in the Grim Retina (the laptop) as a cash register would and slips the printed money inside. "It's gonna RAIN ducks in 2 days, man, it is gonna RAIN!"

"Just dump them all on my head while you're at it." Verne throws in the towel and very politely gives himself the boot outta there. "Drown me." On his way to the Hedge he repeats it in a grunt: "Drown me…"

He bumps into Ozzie near the bulletin board at home.

Ozzie immediately goes, "How many days until my daughter inevitably tries to ditch me?"

"You SHOULD be asking if we're ready to die yet…"

Verne smashes a marker onto the calendar and drags the date across:

DATE: 5/18/07

"...Because there's ONE WEEK! There's one week and RJ's out there trying to hoard rubber ducks for himself! He still thinks we're just gonna… leave home. Phooey."

"Now, uh, it's not MY problem to get involved in, but… well, perhaps you should just forget about him, Verne. Start focusing on what matters." Like living in the trees - what's on the floor is no business to him. The trick's always worked - he's found no interest in any figure but Heather in the instances he's had. He's put his sights on the bullseye.

"Forget about him?! He's trying to get THEM to forget me! My tail can't take it with this guy; It's JUST like last year! Now I'M gonna go dunk my head in the pond. Maybe I'll wake up from this… NIGHTMARE I'm having!"

"But Verne, you're not an amphibian! You may DROWN yourself!"

"Good riddance."

XXX

In the suburbs still, and they're now lazing about, facing each other near a lamppost, RJ and Heather. The money keeps printing away.

"What day is it?" Heather yawns. "Friday?"

Why is Friday familiar?

"Friday…" RJ nods. It clicks some switch in him though - a faint thought. No effect for a second. "Yeah, Friday…" Just then his back jerks itself up along with his feet, and he screams, "Wait, FRIDAY! THE END OF THE WEEK! You're supposed to be giving your SPEECH this morning!"

Crap.

Heather slaps her head as hard as she can. "Nooooo, the SPEECH! I haven't written any of it…"

It's like the world becomes real to them, resulting from the shattered remains of an aesthetic plane. Their spirits don't part. They conjoin in different emotions: guilt, pain, heart-stopping realization.

"Oh nooooo… C'mon Heather, you've put us off-beat for REALSIES this time! We had so much time to prepare, and what did we do with it? Play 'Love in an Elevator' by Aerosmith?! You had a plan, you GAVE us a plan, 'n then you blew it! POOF."

"RJ, stop! There's gotta be a way we can fix this!" Heather greatly resists the guilt her impulses try to deal to her by plugging her ears to silence his foul tune. It overtakes her anyway the longer RJ goes on about the truth of the matter.

"This is why we should've stuck to MY plan! 'GET 'em to like us'! 'GET 'em on our side'! I HAD a plan! And so help me, if I don't HAVE a Twinkie to stress-eat on right now, I'LL-!" He almost lifts himself from his seat, darting his momentum in her direction. Heather almost falls back from hers. Heather herself doesn't wreck his train - her tail is the one to act, yanking a Twinkie from the golf bag and shoving it into RJ's mouth. Thank you, tail.

Because, Heather herself can't explain what she's feeling now, in the company of him when he wants NOTHING of her. After everything this week, now he wants nothing.

The soul-sucking defeat takes RJ's seat down just after being jolted up from it. "And even worse," he continues while targeting his anger onto the Twinkie instead of her, "Verne must have some kinda funky voodoo doll or somethin' because I am being stabbed like Caesar right now…"

The sky gets brighter and more red from the devil of the rising sun. "It's my fault." Heather's breathing gets dangerously forceful, and her voice loses rhythm. "Like I- I shouldn't of gotten you to do all these things with me, like-"

RJ refuses, and throws the Twinkie down. "No, I'm sorry, that was rash, okay? Heather, I loved EVERY single thing we did this week! ESPECIALLY sucking cheese sauce off our toes, that was AWESOME!"

"...But what does it matter now?" she whines. "I blew it."

"No hard feelings; You're the kid here, you are NOT taking blame-!"

"I'm just a kid to you TOO?!"

"NO, but-" He's flinching every second on different joints and muscles. It cracks his head to the sky and clenches his grip onto his forehead. "OOOOOOHHH Verne is now proceeding to stab me in UNFATHOMABLE places! Repeatedly in WEIRDER ones!"

"This is so totally stressfullll!"

"We're not DOING anything!"

"THAT'S the stressful part!"

"O-KAY-!" The hammer of his fist comes down. One house's window slams shut at the same time. There's commotion. Not theirs anymore. Until he shoots his arms like harpoons to hook onto Heather's shoulders, and calmly asserts, "Heather, we are gonna write this speech like we do everything else…"

He slams a blank sheet of white paper between their pairs of squashed legs.

"…In 'n out, never without."

Heather takes a deep breath. "You're right. Together."

They get pencils and burn their hearts out on it, grumbling each time they scribble from the top or bottom. Marks from a giant eraser here and there ('For REALLY Big Mistakes'), and a cloud of grinded lead causing them to cough. Each mistake proves costly to their own lungs, and to each other. They burn their hearts and lungs out on the mission anyway.

But in the end, instead of a masterful piece of literature, all they've done is drawn crude depictions of Verne and Ozzie as some vicious monsters with claws, both being beaten on the head by one baseball bat.

Heather brushes her chin. "I think your Verne needs a bigger nose-"

"OH, we are HOPE-LESS!" RJ grits, slamming himself in a limb frenzy.

He yanks the paper and rips it to shreds, stuffs the scraps in his mouth, aims up and spits an eruption of paper snow over himself. He drags his butt next to her against the lamppost and tugs the Grim Retina in front of his lap.

"I've got no choice. I will now give fate to the lord above. I'm gonna steal an idea from our narrator and you are GONNA have to make it work!"

Well he asked, and he shall receive. He scrunches forward to type up the script furiously. Heather scoots close, closer. Then locks her timid hands and sneaks her muzzle over his shoulder only to peek, glancing constantly between the screen and his engaged expression of red. Her eyes are sad, and blue.

"I'm nervous," she weakly strums.

Putting his frown in the freezer, RJ goes serene: "That's not like you, 'possum pal."

The typed page prints at a hit of the enter key. He feels the fresh sheet from the nearby printer be encased by his hand, and he gifts that warmth to her. She glosses it over. Her brain refuses to comprehend any of the words. Black lines on a page, they appear to wall in her mind and confidence, put them behind barbed wire. They have no key nor tempo.

At a firm skimming over the letters, without reading a single word, her eyes play half-hearted notes. "Now that I look at it, a speech doesn't feel… ME, y'know? I'd feel better if it were like, somethin' with a beat, I guess…"

"You're gonna get everyone on board this family outing, even VERNE, I'd bet," he reassures her. "Now let's MOVE IT MOVE IT!"

He bulldozes her all the way back into the forest. He pushes her to the location of a cardboard stage platform set up in front of their fort's gate, with a cracker-box podium. He quickly throws a little black suit on her with a red tie, fit for a child's doll.

"Alright, very brief and very NOT PANICKED pep talk, okay? We're allll countin' on you, 'possum pal! And by 'all', I mean me. You know these folks inside 'n out. Thankfully, I only know 'em outside. No pressure. Just really get IN those guys for me, will ya? And, uh, again… no pressure. I hope you're not feeling pressure by me saying 'pressure' right now."

She takes a step forward with her paper. RJ watches from behind.

"Get your voice out there…" she goes softly to herself. "Get the family together. Gotta impress him."

Heather appears before the podium, calm as a leaf on a dirt road, and smacks the bottom edge of her foreign paper against the cardboard twice.

"Attention! All… log-goers, I guess."

She forces a halt in their wheels, working as sentries around the site. Robotically, nearly a dozen sets of eyes lock onto her little being. She finds no character in them, but intimidation instead, as nearly a dozen mannequins without hue. They only have eyes. No other features.

"If you all could um…" She twirls a finger. "...y'know, gather 'round or something, that'd be great, thanks."

Stiff movements crowd them in front of the stage.

"Awesome, awesome. Scooch in! C'mon!"

RJ wanders over and joins Hammy in the back of the audience, his arms nervous behind his back. Hammy leaves for just a second to assemble a bunch of rubber ducks, dressed in varying apparel, into a larger crowd spaced between the foragers and beyond.

Hammy then shoots a good ol' thumbs up to Heather, and she groans softly at the addition to the pressure. Now she has something to prove to a bunch of rubber ducks as well. Awesome sauce. And then he brings out Jeffery to stare her down too, with those menacing chocolate chips of his.

"Anyway…" Heather clears two crinkly toads from her throat, then reads straight from the paper. To start at first, but to become a locked state of psychological insecurity, her eyes veer from the audience to the paper without ever looking up. Just the first words soak the emotion out of her voice: "'Four score-'"

A little beeping game console interrupts her. RJ marches up to the porcupine kids and tears the Innuendo DS away to snap it in half.

She continues. "…'Four score and seven years ago… and two moooore… the war to end all wars ended.'" The writing of the omnipotent, currently-present narrator befuddles her. "Okayyy. 'World War I ended with about 40 million human deaths.' Wild. That's like 5 years of 'possum roadkill on normal years. 'This war was pointless…'"

"Good show, good show!" A hushed approval at base, RJ secretly grinds his teeth through the lips and twitches his feet under the roof of the grass.

Hammy taps his foot furiously without end. "I'm bOOOOOred," he yawns next to RJ. "I'd rather be watching Uncle Verne's favorite racing channel. At least they pan in on the audience eating roasted nuts sometimes."

Heather drones on. "'...just like our wars were pointless last week. We had losses too, but then that night, when we saved Hammy from the weirdo human jaws of the Sniffer, we were united as a family, aaanddd-'" After she trails off, she never returns. She can't find the will to read more. Because at last, she looked up.

What a mistake, to be peering her sights into a field of inner ghouls. The apathetic crowd stares her down. United in the action, but so empty somehow, and unmoving. The pressure she feels then. As hollow as the rubber ducks Hammy set up, but unlike them, they contain souls. They contain character. They may squeak from fear or excitement, with pure emotion behind it. She's squealing from both.

Practically, the animals act as cardboard cutouts of flesh and bone. Through her lens, her filter, they look much different from each other, but the hive doesn't buzz. Nothing is intertwined between them minus the disinterest tying her ears shut, plugging her nose, and numbing her fingers.

"Oh jeez the narrator's analogy is stupid." A stupid opinion. She thinks, "Crap, I need someone."

That 'mental narrative coach' comes to her answer in some illusion of a whisper - almost as if the voice of hers sourced from somewhere in the physical plane, not just her head: "No you don't! You just need inspiration, homie! Make it 'you'."

"You mean improvise? I'm so screwed."

Some muttering comes upon the group while she's in a pause, preferring their own topics over her silence. It blisters into madness.

"What's going on?" Ozzie shouts. "I haven't made my coffee yet, Heather!"

Dad…

"I haven't beaten Oz' TO the coffee yet, Heath'uh!"

Stella.

"This is a mess to my STRICTLY-SCHEDULED DIET!"

Tiger?

"What's the big idea here?"

"I have to feed the kids!"

Lou and Penny.

"We want muffins!"

"O-ey O's!"

"Morning GAME time!"

The porcupines… those little poop nuggets who stole her phone…

All Hammy does is stare down Heather, ringing his sad little doorbell with his lips shriveled dryer than a raisin.

Why can't she just run away from this and call it quits? She escapes so many other stress factors as they come to her feet. Now they cage her head. She can hardly breathe in here, with breaths hastening and hastening before soon enough the dome will blow to pieces and her head combust itself! The glasses she feels she wears, though they're not there, begin to shatter and snap.

"Oh my god… This's my fault I'm even in this."

Then her filter glasses come sweeping off, which once skewed her view only to latch onto one raccoon. Now there's a crowd, but not just a crowd, a family, interacting with one another and herself as the greatest hive of character she has ever seen. They're no longer transparent, or lifeless. No attack is - they're targeted by sole emotional motive. Pathos, in a different kind of response to her likability, or as she now finds it, gullibility to her use. The intertwining complaints and gestures targeted right at her mug, and the mingling between them. How did she ignore this? Words between species, between identities, between kinds, and personalities. Something can bring them together as her crappy speech can. Something like her, maybe. Verne speaks to everyone. He has grit and confidence. She has neither. Okay maybe the grit part isn't necessary. But every family needs some awesomeness, right? Right now all claws are pointed at her. She can retract them; She can flip their frowns upside down. She can!

And it has to be interactive, just as the family is-

"That's it, I'm comin' on the stage, Heath'uh!" Stella attempts to get up there herself before Heather can decide on her course of action. RJ bodyguards the stage and shoves her back.

Someone large and green, with a neatly-shined back, comes to get a piece of the action. When he moves, the rest of the family follows soon. "What's the meaning of this, RJ? I know you condoned it! She's wasting the family's time!"

There's Verne, attacking the web she's clung herself to.

"The family?..." Is Heather trying to remind herself? It appears to be. "I've got like a family too, don't I? Not just RJ."

RJ jerks his head around and urges her scathingly to continue as the crowd is lost from her speech. That same crowd overwhelms him quickly.

"Maybe dad was right earlier. I- I need to think about the family. What brings a family together? Okay like, wait wait… Well what gets me 'n RJ together?"

"Listen, stinky-pants," her coach intervenes. "Do you remember like, anything that happened this week?"

She does look for such inspiration in the forest around them, up to the high treeline where she's naturally drawn to as an escape. Gravity seems to tug her eyes down as a motive. Weight flooding over her lower lids steer the ship to some grounded constellations instead, as the glint of the sun peeking past the overcast reflects off a shiny treasure. Past the corner of the fortress wall her head turns, where beyond the fort, over the pond and through the willow, one CD leaning against a stack paints rainbows over her iris. From this mental prism, she can nearly see through the disc to the black sharpie writing on the dull side. Her Banger Roll is there as well.

Her beat forms itself nearly subconsciously. One of her toes begins to tap. This is it. She can feel it. It's growing. Her happy tail starts to swing. The music's getting louder, bouncing and jittering around her skull, which plays the strings of her muscles and puts her body in that concentrated level of awesomeness she sought. She rides a crystal-clear view back to the crowd conversing and gossiping angrily on their own. RJ, sat down since a second's passing, delves into his own matters, sorting through some album cases he's got.

"Ooo, hoot hoot, you two are music guys," Heather's coach chimes in.

"Did you like just figure this out?" Heather snorts backwards to her brain.

She stares back down at her paper, then back at the CD collection. The music's still going. From 8 to 9. It can't quite max out - not without her. A speech doesn't have a peppy beat to it. It's just… words. Dull, dull words.

"Music!" she proclaims within. "That's it! I've gotta make this 'work' MY work! Coach, you're right, I've gotta make it ME!" Though her tail goes from a happy rattle to a mousy one. "But dammit, I never sing in FRONT of people…"

"So suck your thumb 'n DO it!" the coach snarks. "Be a kid. Be yourself. Get your voice out there." With Heather currently sucking her thumb, one final nudge should end her switcheroo stumbling. "And RJ'll like iiiit…"

That's the last bolt of her cage loose.

"Alright… SCREW this!"

She kicks the podium down, tears her page in half, and buries the scraps into the stage. In front of the public, she rips her suit and tie from her chest and unveils to them her bare, hairy, awesome, Heather self. No one makes a peep then.

On second thought, RJ does, trying to peep of anything without cussing her out: "Heather, what are you DOING-?!"

But Hammy's ecstatic of her change in attitude, plugging RJ's mouth and whispering, "Shhh, she's working, SHE'S WORKINGGG!"

"Uh no, she's NAKED! And CRAZY!" Verne chuckles loudly in response. "Who on Earth is gonna listen to this teenager-?"

Everyone but RJ and Verne attentively step one pace forward. Boulders shifting at once.

RJ tucks Verne close and quietly pats his head.

Heather's voice sweeps over the scene like mist, overtaking from an unknown location, for she disappeared suddenly from the stage, to a gasp from all. "Now presenting… so totally the ONLY marsupial found in North Americaaaaa…" A star falls from the sky, hidden by emerging daylight. Heather pops down from leafy curtains, hanging upside-down by her tail from a high tree's thin branch. Not too far from RJ's entrance over a year prior. "Me."

Ozzie coughs.

Heather points double fingers between their totally different stomachs. "No pouch. Don't count." She flips herself down to the stage, in front of the toppled, forgotten podium, to meet them again. "RJ, pass me that freakin' GOOD stuff."

He finds himself flicking her a random CD on command.

"I don't wanna break into song," she starts with a grin. "Buuut…"

She puts it into an old green CD player she's got on deck, and goes smug.

"We've totally got the leg room to make this like… well… interactive."

RJ scratches his chin from a bit of intrigue at her approach. "Interactive?"

"Interactive!?" go the kids, plus Hammy.

"Interactive?" Verne drops. "Oh no-"

Just the beat she needs comes to her aid. A karaoke track. Or more like a simple, moving beat her words can rhythmically clap: "Look, this ain't a Disney movie. But c'mon, follow me!"

She swings the player onto her shoulder like it's a boombox and leads them, singing full of the lusty energy she wields perfectly in check with herself and her proud, loud volume:

(Heather)

I got the questions, you got the answers, right? What's it you want from a fa-mily?

(Others)

What?

(Heather)

What's it you want from a fa-mily?

I'm talkin' places to be seein', meetin' fresh new faces, or just lyin' back in pillow hea-ven, ba-by!

The group picks up on the gist of her 'interactive' number and follow her closely down the Hedge, away from home.

(Heather)

So take a listen to the radio!

(Others)

-O!

(Heather)

Don't stop for breath, y'know I won't talk slow!

(Others)

-No!

(Heather)

I think this family'd grow if we found a place to let it… steal… the show!

Without any pause, a microphone suddenly falls from the sky into her raised hand, and her voice amplifies tenfold.

(Heather)

So bring the beat! Bring the beat!

Brought the gang all here 'n now we're on a roll!

Bring the beat! Bring the beat!

Get in the mix of it and take your chance to sing it, now!

(Others)

So bring the beat! Bring the beat!

(Heather)

Join the fa-mi-ly, together we'll bring the beat!

'N if you're feelin' he-si-tant we'll free yaaaaaaaa…

She throws the mic to Hammy.

(Heather)

We will… bring the… beat… to… you!

There comes no pause between his words, just slow enough to be at the very least comprehensible:

(Hammy)

Uh, hey my name is Hammy, if it helps it rhymes with Sammy, I've got hugs as soft as jelly, and they're MADE- WITH- LOVE, but I'm quick to pull the trigger on the stuff I choose for dinner, cuz today I ate a worm and no it's not the gummy kind, but I was really hungry and it tasted really squishy, I thought it was a candy but then it wriggled on my tooth in the back, that's my story, oh and HEY did you get any o' that?

Heather bumps the mic away from him.

(Heather)

Well thanks Ham', we still got some work to do

It goes to RJ.

(Heather)

So, next up we will bring the beat… to… you!

RJ is unsure of what to say, having to complete his whole verse in one breath after all. Even though his face slowly deteriorates and suffocates itself, and his voice grows steadily higher, he builds up a catchy rhythm halfway through that Heather can get behind:

(RJ)

Well okay my name is RJ - that's one 'J' please - and I think you shouldn't toss it to a guy who isn't ready, like I get it's interactive but my brain is losing traction, like the oxygen I'm breathin's getting thin and gettin' heated, so guess what? I gotta bid- adieu, and I gotta bring the beat back- to- you! PHEW!

RJ collapses face-first.

"Guys, singing super fast isn't like a requirement, y'know," Heather mentions out of song.

RJ only barely manages to pick himself up and inflate his lungs like a balloon. "Hammy set a precedent…"

"Whatever…"

She returns to the beat.

(Heather)

What's it you want from a fa-mily?

(Others)

Huh?

(Heather)

I'll show ya what it takes to be a fa-mily!

(Others)

Yeah!

Down the Hedge, the mob brainlessly follows her. Except Verne. "They're being herded like animals… wait."

(Heather)

From my heart I've pulled this me-lody, and you've got-ta see, some u-nity will set us free.

And now I know you're thinkin'-

Verne tries his hardest to break in from the back of the marching crowd. "Uh?"

(Heather)

You think you've been mistaken-

"Hello?"

(Heather)

To be trailing along some stupid soooong-!

(Others)

No!

(Heather)

No? Alright, like keep it flow-in'-

She glances at RJ, who comes up loyally at her side, and directs her next words right at him:

(Heather)

-our music could take you 'n me anywheeere!

(RJ)

So bring the beat!

(Heather)

Oh!

(RJ)

Bring the beat!

(Heather)

Woo!

(RJ)

You brought the gang all here 'n now we're on a ro-OLL!

(Heather)

Bring the beat!

(RJ)

Yeah, bring the beat!

(Both)

Get in the mix of it and take your chance to sing it, now!

(Others)

So bring the beat! Bring the beat!

(Heather)

Join the fa-mi-ly, together we'll bring the beat!

'N if you're feelin' he-si-tant we'll free yaaaaaaaa…

The mic goes to Stella.

(Heather)

We will… bring the… beat… to… Stel-la!

"Stel-la?!" Verne bursts from his lips in simple betrayal. It's a ladder structure of cracking wood within, breaking platform-by-platform the more she contributes to his downfall:

(Stella)

Well- I'm not much for song, but well- I'm still- just singin' along. I've been hooked up on the TV, taking life a bit too easy, now I'm on my stinkin' FEET, ready to blow for fa-mil-y

Now Verne-

He puts his full attention into the card reader now.

(Stella)

-You just sit back 'n let the girl work, or else you'll get your tail hurt, tryin' to mess up her skirt!

His face drops from anger to neglect, as simple as that.

Heather bounces back from the front of the line and quickly steals the mic from her to try and get Verne on board, instead of hissed at.

(Heather)

Just have some fun, take part like everyone

She spins away in a hurry.

(Heather)

I'll check back in just a sec' okay, this cab still needs a driver, now Tig-er-!

She holds the mic stoutly at his face beside him while his four limbs are occupied during the march. Tiger puts on a valiant show with the militaristic beat that follows his exact footsteps.

(Tiger)

To BE a prince you must be fit, not to binge on fishes and dishes your owner stuffs you with. Now I'm out of home, but not alone; My belly would agree, living with you all my spirit's never felt so free! So I've sworn my every life to this thing called fa-mi-ly, now it's time to bring to beat to… Oz-zie!

The mic's thrown to him by Heather. "Daaad!"

"Oh." Ozzie grips the mic carefully in front of him, unprepared for his conclusion under her musical regime, even a showman, he is. "Um, okay, well, here it goes…"

A slower, more orchestrated melody locks his feet in place. A complete overhaul of Heather's fast-paced style. His words fall down like raindrops on a lilypad:

(Ozzie)

I've been spending life from making life…

With starry nights poured at the seams of my mem-ories…

Aaaaand instant regret. Ozzie's already been more effective than Verne at halting Heather's progress with getting the family down the Hedge. They stand still to watch him perform, and it peeves Heather. "Oh c'mon."

(Ozzie)

To think you'd leave me torn at the sight of your risky hand…

It spoils my cards, so please, hear meeee…

The pace picks up, and they both sing quickly in their distinct styles. Heather fights to get the mic back from him. He spins away each time she lunges her arms at him.

(Heather)

Dad, you really need to go, you're messing up the show-

(Ozzie)

I- need- you- to- re-turn- to- meeeee…

(Heather)

No really, hit the road, this junk has gotta go-

(Ozzie)

I- need- you- to- start- see-ing- clear-lyyyyy!

(Heather)

This bridge's lame as hi-stor-y-

(Ozzie)

You don't understand me-

Heather finally manages the mic from his hand.

(Heather)

Yeah, like whatever- We will… bring the… beat… to… Verne!

The mic bonks Verne in the head. He doesn't pick it up. Heather's baffled, to say the least.

(RJ)

Just leave 'em be, we gotta run the show, let's go go GO!

Segments of parts of every other make a perfect harmony in the background of Heather's voice above everyone else's.

(Heather)

What's it you want from a fa-mily? I'll show ya what it takes to be a fa-mily-!

(Hammy, in an overlapping opera)

I ate a wooorm to-DAAAAAAYYY!

(Heather)

[-DAAAAAAYYY!] From my heart I've pulled this me-lody, and you've got-ta see, some u-nity will set us free.

(Hammy, overlapping again)

I ate a worm to-daaaaayyy…

(Heather)

[-daaaaayyy] And now I know you're thinkin' as we string this thing we're makin'

Yeah I know that now you're thinkin'-

(Everyone)

-we're not mi-stakeeennn-!

The melody dies, coming to just the simple beat of a wood block. Hushed, the rhythm's directed specifically at RJ next to her as she whispers in a more timid nature.

(Heather)

Please keep showing me the good life-

(Others)

Oooh!

(Heather, subtly pointing at Ozzie)

I can't go alone with this price (dad)-

(Others)

O-o-oh-!

Heather directs herself loudly back to the whole group.

(Heather)

This family's about 'we' not 'me' you'll see-!

(Others)

We will… bring the… beat… to… Hea-ther!

"Oh, and, by the way," Heather cuts the end of the track to say. "We're goin' on a family outing today."

Everyone realizes how far they've already walked a bit too late to object. The Log is nowhere in sight anymore. Nothing of home is. Beyond that, across identical woods, it seems they've moved nowhere else. But they sense it - not just a fair distance down the Hedge, but an irretrievable distance.

Not a pair of feet move. Not even one. Not a single clue where they are, or how they got here. They did, is all that matters. Heather's music guides this family into the future.

"Super duper there, Heather!"

"Jeepers, Heather had us in a boogey!"

"That was so better than game time, Cousin Heather!"

"Yeah Cousin Heather, we want an encore! En-core! En-core!"

"Are we there yet, Cousin Heather?"

"I knew you'd make it fun, Heather. I knew you would! I told you so, RJ! It was awesome."

"Verne, take it from Heath'uh, SHE knows how to be a family."

"I've never paid any attention to Heather but… I can't even argue with that."

"I suppose that's our day covered. As a prince I say, lead the way, fair Heather!"

The name's a complete blur to her. It flutters around her like a fairy shouting to her over and over, though she hears it as a broad praise. Why she'd done it, hadn't she? Cussing her once, singing with her the next, and now, they unite under her name. Just like the Hammy situation. Just like she'd known it would work. Just like she planned. The interactiveness Heather brought upon them as a family have them follow her parade. They have no problem now, all of them, trailing to Heather's beat - from the so-called kid of the group - for the morning.

RJ indulges himself a bit too far in victory in the back of the pack, spinning all around and bouncing by the soles of his feet. "YOU said it!" he reminds Verne, that speechless onlooker. "Under ONE lock! Feelin' giddy or what?"

"This is NOT what I meant, RJ! They're following her for no reason. They don't know WHAT they're doing!"

"Too late, ya got that 'unifying force', that 'key' ya wanted, man! Look at her go!"

Verne watches him spin off with a huff, and everyone wanders behind Heather's lead through the tame morning fog. Each step cuts a clear path to them, but Heather becomes the first to trek forward. The fog is only light, but that implies a light bit of uncertainty which Heather brushes away by lighting through. Verne halts his feet, but forces them to resume after a moment, as any ounce of hesitation draws him further from the mindless pack. Her performance left an impression on his startled face nonetheless.

RJ dances his way up to Heather and scares her with his energy. "I thought you were free-ballin' it for a sec' but that was GREAT!" he laughs breathlessly. "You recited that?"

Flattered in her cheeks, she inches her muzzle back from his praise. "Uh, no."

Her one word snaps his arms down to his sides. "Oh so you WERE free-balling it. I respect the audacity."

"That was for you, y'know."

"For me?"

"Yeah." She's real slick about it too. "Wanted to put my vocal cords to use, right? Now guess what? The family's back together AND I'd bet they totally love you now. You're welcome."

Out of appreciation for her sudden sly nature he nods continually and replies, "Well consider that a 'thank you' from me…"

His open hand rises to the level of her head. An offering of celebration. She nods the same and offers her own. They reach back and slap their hands together like velcrow.

Immediately when their palms collide… frozen. The family must've stopped just behind them, for any sounds of shuffling stop. Their hands stick glued together for a second, all sprawled out and jumbled between fingers. They stare blankly from one pair of eyes into the other. Nothing from their blue-to-blue lets them process. Heather might've glanced up at their hands once, but forgets that instantly, in the pause.

Then… RJ gives in and takes his silent cue to slowly morph his hand into a tight rock fist. She crumples her paper all over it and grins cutely.

This is still just for fun, right? Is it? Not anymore. Not from the way he reacted, full of lively might and invigoration. A dance and song for her own ears and eyes it feels, like her heart thumps faster to match his tempo. The amusement in his countenance only further dribbles the aura of significance and worth she's compelled to feel around herself. Just as it'd been proven to her, it'd been proven to him. She is the lock that needs no key.

"I'm not a kid to you, am I? I'm me. Awesomely me."

As far as the rock and paper thing? Yes this metaphor has been made 3 times. The point's across.

RJ, bouncing in spirit, breaks his hand free. "Heather, you were right the whole time - You are important. So why don't you try it out?"

"Try out what?"

"Your new place in the family. Take a look."

He shows her the family behind them, awaiting the two to continue leading down the Hedge. They're all looking at Heather, and she's, simply put, in awe at it. Except Verne. He's got his arms crossed instead, and pointed away. But who cares.

Heather utters, "What? These guys are all looking to me? Awesome sauce."

"All these giddy faces are waiting for someone to do the thinking for them," explains RJ from his typical experience in the role. He makes a popping sound when he takes two fingers and picks an imaginary object off his forehead and presents his little ball of air to her. "Heather, I will GRACIOUSLY allow you to borrow my ego just this once- er, leadership! Leadership…"

Heather stares at his fingers.

He pokes at her puffy chest. "Now TAKE it."

Okay. She faces the family, takes a breath, and suddenly, RJ puts his journal in her hands, open to the page where their dream forest is drawn. She looks it over. From a purple waterfall, down a creek and to a willow tree, bursting with blue hotdogs, the wiener willow is there. What was even the point of it again? To draw some other animals in towards their awesome new home? Clearly she's got the charm to draw some in on her own, yeah, she's got that covered. But there are several other attractions in this dream home of theirs that could use some finding.

She smiles, raises her head, and flips the book to the group (with authority). "You guys see this?"

Everyone nods in perfect unison. And all their looks go transparent to show their personalities to her like gold behind glass. And oh, this feeling, it rocks her socks off! If she had any. So incredibly foreign. The sock part would be too. She hardly gets the time to process with every look locked on her. She HAS to answer.

"Jeez, this is like super weird… Um, alright, we're lookin' for somethin' like this, okay? So put on your funky pants, or… whatever-"

"Mmm-hmm, funky pants," RJ reiterates to the gang, proudly by her side.

"And also, I'm nominating RJ as our taxi driver for today," she says while rubbing the side of her playful arm up RJ's.

"Yep, that's right-!" He drops his smug, RJ grin. "Wait what?"