Watts had consumed a lot of pudding. Pudding and cheeseburgers. Normally, a middle-aged man like himself needed to be quite conscious of what he ate. As it happened, however, the only good food that the hospital provided was the little cups of gloopy chocolate pudding and the dry yet satisfying cheeseburgers. He had wanted to like the chicken nuggets, but they were obviously microwaved.

After the excruciating pain caused by Tyrian's venom had been relieved, Watts actually quite enjoyed his stay at the hospital. The hospital blankets were comfortable, and the gown they had him wear was like an agreeable set of pajamas. Plus, he even had his own little room with a good tv on a stand right beside him. The channels, admittedly, were very limited, but he had surprisingly found himself very much enjoying that "Who is the Father?" show; on one episode, a man had even done a backflip when he realized the kid wasn't his! And the view of Atlas from the window was hard to beat, giving him a constant stream of sunlight and a wonderful sight of the metal and glass skyline.

Not only that, but he had received a conga line of people (including generals and scientists) praising his bravery and calling him a hero.

He was finally getting some of the gods damn attention he deserved.

The only thing he didn't like was having to give some of the attention back. "Yes," he said to Penny, "I'm so sorry for you, too. You must be hurting."

The Fighter unit had come with its creator to give their best wishes. Watts sat back and took their kindness the way a fraudster took someone's money.

"Thank you," Penny said with a nod. Beside her, Pietro also muttered his thanks.

Watts kept on his best sad face.

"But he's a survivor, you know." Watts held his hand out. Penny looked at it tentatively, before taking it in her own. "He was made to be crafty and to never give up. No matter what." He squeezed Penny's hard metallic fingers, hidden only by cloth gloves.

Pietro had created such an unsophisticated thing.

"Thank you," Penny said, squeezing his own hand. He needed to suppress a wince, as she really still did not understand her own strength.

"Of course," he said. "Of course."

"Why don't you show him what you prepared for him, Penny?" Pietro asked. He held up a small cardboard box.

Penny scowled uncharacteristically. "I was about to."

Watts suppressed a smirk.

Penny opened the box and took out a little potted plant. Well, it wasn't potted but placed inside a laboratory beaker; it was still a plant, though.

"An edelweiss flower," Penny clarified. "When Leif and I went on a training exercise a few months ago, we fought Grimm in the mountains. We found some edelweiss growing there and we picked some."

Penny held out the beaker for him. The flower had stiff, fuzzy white petals and light-yellow centers, like a batch of little suns emitting their rays of light. It was a pretty flower.

"Thank you so much," Watts said.

"We started growing some in the lab." Penny looked down at her feet.

"It's beautiful."

Pietro patted Penny's shoulder, and she didn't have the heart this time to push him away. "Penny, would you like to spend some time out in the hall now?" She nodded. "Good, I would also like to speak with Arthur privately." She nodded.

Penny shuffled out the room, head down.

"Poor thing," Watts said. "They were good friends, right?"

"Maybe if you'd spent more time with them, you wouldn't have to ask me." Pietro scowled. "Leif always wanted to know you better, but you always prioritized your work—"

"Is that why you came here?" Watts said, fingers tightening around the beaker. "To lecture me because I never gave into the delusion of being a father? I'm sorry that one of us decided to actually focus on their job."

"You—"

"When Penny's optics were having issues and you came to me for help, you didn't seem to be unhappy with my work ethic."

"I—"

"Or any of the other times I lent you a hand in repairs," Watts snapped. "Don't judge me."

Pietro swallowed back another retort. He breathed deeply, then let it go. "I'm sorry."

"So am I," Watts lied. "I shouldn't have snapped like that. I'm sorry." He was very glad to have snapped.

"I'm just mad; we all are." Pietro leaned back in his robotic chair and folded his arms over his chest. "I wanted to come here and put some of our differences aside."

"Is that so?"

"I want to thank you for trying to protect Leif. And, despite everything, I've always wanted to consider you a friend."

"And I you," Watts lied.

"So I just wanted to make sure you were doing well."

"Thank you." Watts nodded. "I do appreciate it."

He was beginning to wonder when the old man was going to leave, for he would much rather be watching more exuberant not-fathers do backflips.

"I also wanted to offer you the curtesy of a warning."

"A warning?"

"Yes, this rather unpleasant man named Sundown has been questioning just about everyone in the lab. You know the captain of the squad on your plane?"

"The one with the meaty hands?"

"Yes, that one. Sundown brought him into a room and an hour later the captain came out sobbing."

"Oh…" Watts swallowed nervously. He had been expecting this, of course. The Atlas Intelligence Service was not something to mess with.

"They're calling your assistant, Novos, back soon as well." Pietro adjusted his glasses. "A shame to have one's vacation cut short."

"Ah yes, vacations," Watts said. "I'm going to take a good break the second I can. I want to head to Vacuo and find a place to get my mind off of things under some palm trees."

"I can't blame you," Pietro said. "I can't blame you at all. But that might be a little while; security's been tight since we lost the androids."

"Androids? With an s?"

"Yes, the Pursuer went rogue."

"What!?" Watts shot straight up in bed; he winced at the residual pain in his back flaring up again, but he forced himself to ignore it. "What happened?"

"Nobody told you?"

"No, nobody told me!"

"Ah…" Pietro glanced around nervously, although they were the only ones in the room. "Well then, I may not be allowed to tell you—"

"Too late for that! What do you mean it went rogue?"

"Well…" Pietro rubbed his hands together, wondering if he was digging himself deeper into a hole. He decided that he probably was, but the panic in Watts's voice made him dig more anyway. "They were vacating its research lab, but when it was turned on, the android broke itself out. Reportedly, it somehow got itself a target and is in pursuit, not letting anyone—even us—stop it."

"How did it get a target? And who?"

"We don't know," Pietro said. "It's a complete mystery. Our best guess is that someone involved in Leif's kidnapping somehow also corrupted it or got caught themselves and just turned it off."

"I…" Watts gulped. "Any idea where it is?"

"They said it was heading to the southwest."

"Ah…" Watts recalled that they were taking Leif to a city in the southwest part of the continent. "That… is bad."

"Certainly," Pietro said with a melancholy sigh. "Our entire department is in shambles. Rumor has it that they're going to dissolve the tripartite android program. They'll only keep who's necessary to work on Penny, then send the rest to different projects."

"Right…" Watts said. He slowly leaned back into the bed.

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have dropped this on you." Pietro glanced over to the door. Then he looked down at his watch. "I do have a flight to catch. When you feel better, please reach out again."

"Of course…" Watts's sweaty hands gripped the flower-beaker.

"Are you going to be alright?"

"Yes."

"Ah…" Pietro's robotic spider legs whirred and thumped against the floor with each step. "Get better soon."

The door closed. Watts looked down at the flower in his hands.

He chucked the beaker at the trash can on the other side of the room. He missed, instead hitting the wall just beside the can. The beaker shattered into a thousand pieces of glass, and dirt spewed out all over the floor. The flower laid limply like corpse on the polished white tile.

Watts wanted a lot more pudding, because he suddenly had a lot of anxiety to eat away.

The night before, Omsk had slept on the bed, Hazel had taken the couch and Jaune was happy on the floor. (He did not need to sleep for the same reasons as a human, but entering a rest mode was necessary to cool down his internal systems.)

When Jaune woke up, however, Hazel had left.

"Stay here," Omsk said with a wag of her finger.

"Got it!"

"And silence."

Jaune nodded.

"Good, now—"

"Where'd Hazel go?"

She scowled.

"He left early to go take care of some business," she said. "We're all very busy people, including me. So I'm going to go get some cough drops from the store, then get a crate that we're going to use to ship you off to Vacuo in a few days."

"Oh that sounds fun! What kind of crate?"

"Just some normal wood filled with straw. The ship is going to take almost a month, so you better be ready to take a long nap."

"Aw..."

"But hey, then you'll get out and meet with Watts." She handed him a little notebook filled with line after line of her scratchy scrawl. "These are all the directions you'll need. I'm being called back to the lab, and if I don't hurry up, they'll get suspicious and send someone to get me."

"Oh no!" Jaune frowned. "Yeah, get going. That would be bad."

"Very bad." She wagged her finger at him. "Just remember: stay in the room, don't make any noise."

Jaune nodded dutifully.

"Can I get a name for the order?" the barista asked.

"Streetlamp Salad."

The teenager behind the counter gave him a curious look, then she laughed. "Haven't heard that one before. Though a guy yesterday said his name was Pasta Pete."

"Hey, that's a good name!"

"But I know him from the farmer's market, runs a stall named Frank's Hoagies. Guy definitely looks like a Frank."

"Frank's a good name, too!"

"Would you like some pudding with that?" she asked, pointing at little cups of chocolate and vanilla in a glass case beside the register. "They're fresh."

"I have no money!"

"Heh, feel that," the barista said with another chuckle. She told him to take a seat outside, as the tables inside the little café were full. Jaune nodded dutifully and strolled out; the bell above the door chimed as he left.

He enjoyed the cold breeze that whirled gently around the town square. He had told Omsk that he wouldn't leave the room or make a sound, but so long as he was the sandy-haired and brown-eyed boy known to the denizens of Boggindorf as Streetlamp Salad, then what could be the harm?

And hey, if he had stayed inside the motel, then he wouldn't have seen the sign outside the little coffee shop that advertised it was national Orange Mocha Frappuccino Day and that they would be giving out a free small one to each customer. He didn't know what a mocha was, or a frappuccino either; but he did know what an orange and what a day was, so being half-sure about what he was drinking wasn't so bad.

He looked around with a smile. Boggindorf was a nice town. Perhaps it was not as bustling as it was once upon a time, but the people here seemed hearty and happy with their existence removed from any metropolis.

Omsk had dropped off the parts for the crate at their motel and left without saying goodbye. (Jaune figured that that was because she didn't want to choke up while sadly giving him a farewell.) So that meant he would be on his own these last few days before a crew came to their motel to pick up the crate he would be stowing away in. That gave him plenty of time.

He sat back and relaxed, wondering just what his drink would taste like.

Penny sat on edge and certainly did not relax. She waited for Agent Sundown. Her father had warned her that the man was unkind, but she should still answer his questions truthfully and to the best of her abilities. He was, after all, here to help Leif.

Their meeting was to occur on the balcony of her hotel room. She was glad not to be stuck in some dim interrogation chamber like they show in the movies. Still, she was nervous when she first saw him, and she was more nervous when Pietro nodded at his request to leave them alone. The man wore a crisp silver suit and a clean silver hat, both of which contrasted his dark grey eyes. The smile on his face, however, looked humble and agreeable enough. Still, Penny decided not to let him pull any tricks on her.

Now, she was giggling.

"And then my uncle"– Sundown raised a hand in the air –"still trying to chase the dog, trips right over me because he hadn't seen my crawling around. He fell face first into the grass of my backyard! Bam!" He smacked his hand down on the metal table. "And then the dog (because, you know, dogs can tell when things get serious) turned around and came back to my uncle who was groaning and me who had started crying, and finally drops the trophy right in front of us. I mean, by then it was a chewed-up mess."

Penny's laugh died down to a simple smile.

"So yeah, I can relate to you wanting a dog," Sundown said. "Just know that that was barely a week after we got my puppy. Love that thing to bits still, little Destroyer."

"Why did you name your dog Destroyer if he was just a beagle puppy?"

"Because I was a teenage boy, of course."

Penny smiled again. She actually liked Agent Sundown. He had started off their meeting by apologizing for running a minute late; he was starving and needed to grab a granola bar from the vending machine down in the hotel lobby. He had gotten two, one of which he offered to share. Penny had accepted.

Friend Sundown, that was what she was designating him.

"But I don't want to take up too much of your time," Sundown said as he lugged a suitcase up onto the table. "And I have a very busy schedule, so could we begin?"

"Okay." Some of the nervousness returned. She nibbled on the half-finished granola bar that Sundown had given her. It was sticky with processed honey and had some bits of chocolate in it. Not bad.

Sundown pulled a tan and brick-shaped tape recorder out of the suitcase, a sheaf of papers in a manila folder and a pen. Then he clicked the suitcase shut again and rested it on the floor. "I like to use old-fashioned tech like this"– he tapped the recorder –"so nothing can get hacked. Just a bit more trustworthy, right?"

Penny nodded.

He clicked the pen and its little black tip shot out the end. He pressed a button on the recorder, which whirred; through a glass panel you could see the cassette tape spin steadily.

"Now let's just start off with some easy questions. When was the first time you met Leif?"

"About two years ago. I'm a little older than he is, so I had already been online for a year, whereas he had only been on for six months when we met."

Sundown scribbled notes in bullet-points on the paper. "And you two were close, right?"

"Yes. Good friends. My dad said that we helped each other develop social skills. That and Ciel. She's the only other friend my age that I have."

"And how long have you known Ciel?"

"A little over two years. I'd met her a couple months before I met Leif."

"Right, right. Now for some of the obvious questions. Is there anyone you've ever met who you didn't trust? Who gave you a bad feeling?"

These sorts of questions continued for a while. Penny admitted that she had never felt threatened or put off by any of the staff. She didn't know anything about the Pursuer, but had done a couple practice fights with him; although, she also knew that he was a "normal" robot unlike them, which sort of made her sad. No, Leif had never told her about any suspicions he had. No, she didn't have any suspicions about who could have done this.

This went on for the better part of an hour. Largely un-invasive and never accusatory, it felt more like a conversation than an interrogation. And several times Sundown thanked her for her compliance and told her she was being helpful. She liked that.

"Was there anything causing Leif distress?" he asked. "Anything in particular that he was worried about?"

"Um, there was one thing." Penny added. "But I don't think it has anything to do with him getting taken."

"I would still like to know, if you would."

"Right, of course." Penny sighed. "We had just watched a lesson on human psychology (that's our school, specially made videos for us to watch), and it was about memory. He asked my dad what our memories were like, and he explained our higher and latent memory system. That kind of made Leif upset, because he said he wanted more in his latent memory so that he would not forget them.

"My dad said he couldn't do that since editing our memories could be dangerous, but Leif was still kind of upset about it. He got over it after a few days, though."

"Got over it?"

"Yes, one morning I asked him if he was feeling better, and he just smiled and said it was okay now."

"Right." Sundown filled up his page with notes. "Just a few more questions." He flipped over his fourth sheet of paper, coming to a clean new page. "You said that you and Leif were close. How would you describe your relationship?"

Penny blushed despite herself. She looked down at her hands on the table, where she tapped her index fingers together. "Friends."

"And what was your first feeling when you learned he had been kidnapped?"

Penny gulped, and her blush faded. "I was heartbroken." She laid her hands flat on the table. "Technically I don't have a heart, but that's the best way I can describe it."

"Because you lost someone you care for very much?"

She nodded glumly.

"How much time did you and Leif spend together?"

"We would train every day, sometimes with Ciel, for a few hours. We've gone on many missions together, including twenty now for hunting grimm."

"And besides that?" Sundown asked after scribbling down her answers. "Did you ever spend free time together?"

"Yes."

"How much?"

Penny looked away bashfully.

"I'm sorry if I'm making you sad," Sundown said. "I just want to get a sense of what his life was like."

"No… it's okay." She nodded. "We would spend lots of time together. We lived just down the hall from each other. We watched a lot of movies together, and we would try to cook together, and we would play video games, and we would just sit around and talk and joke and…"

Penny wiped her tears away on her sleeve.

Sundown pulled a soft grey tissue from his coat pocket and held it out for her. "Here."

She took it and dabbed her eyes. "Thank you." She sniffled.

"Not a problem," Sundown said. He pushed his slim glasses up higher on the bridge of his nose, then steepled his fingers and leaned on his elbows. He let his mouth droop into a sympathetic frown. "I can see that you're really hurting."

"He…" Her voice shook. "He is very important to me."

"Of course." Sundown leaned across the table and patted her shoulder.

"I'm sorry…"

"It's okay. It's all okay."

Penny sniffed and balled up the tissue. "Thank you."

"Of course, and I think we can wrap up our interview." He leaned back and pressed a button on the recorder, which stopped spinning.

"I hope I've helped…" Penny said.

Sundown threw his papers into the manila folder. "You have," he said. "There's just one more question I would like to ask you."

"Hm?" She looked at the inert tape recorder.

"This one doesn't need to be on the books."

"Okay," Penny said, looking at him warily.

"How long have you been in love with Leif?"

"What!?" Penny, wide-eyed, threw herself back into her seat as if she'd been punched in the gut. "I don't, um, no!" She looked around the balcony, wondering if anyone else was around to have heard that. The door to the hotel, however, was closed. And only empty air and a view of Atlas was over the balcony railing. "No." She shook her head. "No."

"No?"

"No." Penny, tense all over, shook her head again.

"Really?"

"I…" Penny gulped and looked down at her hands. Her fingers were balled up into tight fists. She crushed the tissue Sundown had given her. "I…" Her stiff shoulders slackened, and her voice fell. "I don't know…"

"You don't know? I apologize for assuming, it's just that"– Sundown shrugged –"in my line of work, I've gotten good at telling these things."

"I…" She rested her face on one of her hands, and she couldn't look up. "I think so. I don't know if robots can fall in love though."

"Why not?"

"I wasn't programmed for that."

"The first fish that crawled out the ocean probably wasn't thinking about romance either," Sundown said, "but here people are, writing love letters and buying roses."

"Edelweiss…" Penny muttered.

"Hm?"

"Edelweiss for us, not roses." She closed her eyes. "I think that is when I realized that I cared for him that way. When we first picked some Edelweiss together out on a training mission."

"Really?"

She nodded. She leaned back in her chair and pressed her hands against her chest, as if guarding her heart. "But I don' know… I don't know if that is what I can call it. I don't know what love is."

"It's a pretty crazy thing," Sundown said softly. "And it's hard to peg down. But it's one of those things that, when it happens, you know."

"Have you ever been in love?"

"Once. Just once."

"Oh…"

He sighed and leaned forward, speaking quietly and carefully. "Do you think he cared for you in the same way?"

"No." The answer was quick. "No. I'm not cool and interesting like Ciel or Winter are. I'm just… me." Her face sank under the weight of thoughts she'd had many times. "He couldn't feel that way for me."

"Don't say that you're just you." Sundown said. "You're pretty damn impressive to me."

Penny's head lowered a little more.

"Listen, the reason I ask you all this is because I want to be sure that I can trust you, that I can believe in you."

"You can!" Penny suddenly insisted. She looked up from her moping and met him in the eye. "You can! I would never do anything to hurt him!"

"Of course you wouldn't," Sundown said. "I know that. And I'm glad to know that, because I can't trust a lot of people right now. The only way Leif could have been taken was if someone who knew him had leaked the information about his glitch and his transport back to the main facility."

Penny's eyes became sullen. "Someone he knew? But people liked him!"

"And someone betrayed him," Sundown said. "Probably someone you know too, someone you trust. There are a lot of people out there who will suddenly turn out to be a person you didn't think they were."

"I—"

"Remember my uncle I was telling you about?"

Penny nodded.

"Well, one day he came over to my family's place to spend the night. My mom wakes up and sees all the cash in the house, all her jewelry—even the wedding ring she left on the nightstand—was gone. My uncle had taken it all. When the police found him, he'd sold it all to pay off his gambling debts. I loved my uncle.

"But you have to know that even people you trust may not really deserve it." Sundown sighed and sat back, obviously saddened by his own story. "I try to think of the good memories about him. I haven't seen him since he went to prison."

"That… that's horrible," Penny said. "I'm sorry."

"But do you see what I mean?"

"I… yes."

Sundown pulled a business card out of his pocket. "Now look me in the eye."

She did.

"I believe in you," he said. "I do. I respect you and what you know and what you can do. Your dad, Ironwood, the other authorities, they don't really respect you. Not really. They love you, but they don't respect you. If they did, they would have let you go out with the search parties to help look for him, right?"

"I…" Penny gripped her fists. "I wanted to help."

"And I know you still can, because I respect you." Sundown slid the business card across the table. "This number goes straight to my office. If you see anything suspicious or have a tip, call me directly."

Penny looked at the card, which had only a phone number printed on it. "Okay, I have it memorized."

Sundown smiled. "Thank you for this, I know I can trust you."

"You can."

Sundown stepped into the passenger seat of a rather normal-looking car (with tinted windows) that waited for him outside the hotel. A woman sat behind the wheel; when Sundown entered, she pulled off a pair of headphones that were wired into a scroll-pad on her lap.

"It all recorded?" Sundown said as he slammed the door shut.

The woman straightened her black bob-cut after taking off the headphones. With a nod, she said, "It did. All saved."

"Good," Sundown said as he buckled in. He reached behind his tie and unclipped a small microphone that had been hidden there. He threw his suitcase in the back seat. The tape recorder inside it was worthless; its microphone was broken, so he couldn't use it even if he wanted to. He just brought it along because people liked to think they knew when they were or weren't being recorded. Naturally, everything he and Penny had said was picked up by the bug under his tie.

"I didn't know you had an uncle," the agent said as she pressed her foot to the gas.

"I have many friends and family members when I need to invent a sympathetic story," Sundown said. "That's one I've been using for years."

"And you've only been in love once?" she asked with another knowing grin.

"Yes, actually."

"Oh."

"Anyway."

The agent handed a scroll-pad to Sundown as they pulled off onto the street. "Updates for you."

"How lovely," he said as he started reading through droll reports.

The other agent tapped claw-like fingernails against the steering wheel. "She seems like a nice girl."

"That she does."

"You really think we'll find the Deceiver alive?"

"He's almost certainly gone. Most likely, his memories were wiped, his source code analyzed and his body split apart to reverse engineer the tech. It's less about finding him and more about finding the perpetrators."

"That it is."

A car honked and cut in front of them to get across the street and make the nearest exit.

"Jerk," the agent said, glaring with her golden, reptilian eyes at the car which had just barreled by. "I swear, driving in Atlas is worse even than Mantle."

"I have to agree," Sundown said. He came to a picture of a bullhead beside a riverbank. "They catching up to the Pursuer?"

"Hardly," she replied. "They found the bullhead it used to escape from its lab after some locals said they saw it crash into a river. The specialists got on it and dragged it back up, but no robot."

Sundown sighed. "Irkutsk said the Pursuer's smart, if not sentient. It knows full well that we're following it, and it'll do everything to shake our tail before focusing on its target. Its also fully submersible, so it probably went miles up or down river before coming out again." He shook his head. "Speaking of Irkutsk, how's the man been?"

"Hasn't left his house since talking to you." That was good news, considering they'd bugged his whole house. "He's gotten into three fights with his wife but still hasn't told her about the affair."

"Of course not, he doesn't have a backbone," Sundown replied. The reason they were particularly critical of Irkutsk was precisely because his affair with his secretary was ripe blackmail and an open secret in the lab.

"But about suspects," the agent said. "We found another one. Though it's a confusing lead."

"Confusing?"

"Look at the video."

Sundown pulled up a video downloaded on the scroll-pad.

"We scrubbed through the hall security cameras and found this."

The somewhat grainy black-and-white footage showed a blurry man wearing a lab coat enter a lab. The video fast-forwarded and showed the man leaving the lab and going down the hall.

"Why are the cameras so terrible?"

"Budgeting."

"That facility's breakroom has a big expensive frappuccino machine with an orange mocha setting."

"Didn't say it was good budgeting."

"Anyway, who is the guy? When was this footage? What's the lab?"

"We don't know. It was the last day that the Pursuer was in the facility. That lab is where it was being held, the big one where it might've gotten into a fight."

"Don't know the guy?"

"The only people he sort of looks like were accounted for at the time. And it couldn't have been someone who snuck into the facility since it's snug in a mountain out in the middle of nowhere with only one entrance. All we know is that a six-foot tall male in a lab coat was somewhere he shouldn't have been. And worse yet, some of the other cameras in the facility were out that day because apparently Leif partially overloaded the grid while running a test on his power system."

"Is that so?" The gears turned in Sundown's mind like clockwork; they ticked and ticked, then settled into position with one last clack. "Let me see something."

He pulled up a page of information labeled D-252, the bio for their missing android. It showed him smiling peppily. As the Deceiver, he could change that smile to look however he wanted. He couldn't change his height from being six feet.

"Well, well, well," Sundown said, "I can't help but wonder if our missing kid is a bit more dastardly than we originally believed."

"Come here buddy," Jaune crooned.

The squirrel looked at him with blank eyes that refused to understand his human speech.

"Come on." Jaune held out an acorn in his palm. "Don't you want it?"

The squirrel stared.

Jaune had wandered around Boggindorf after deciding that orange mocha frappuccinos didn't taste very good (but he still drank it all, not wanting to offend the nice barista who waved at him through the window). He now found himself in a little park by the lighthouse, an open space with a few benches and sturdy old trees.

"Come on, don't you want to be my friend?" he asked the little squirrel. He squatted down and held out the acorn for it. "Little buddy, don't you want an acorn?"

The squirrel turned around and bounded away.

"Aw man…"

"Squirrels aren't like dogs," said a man behind them. "They're more, well, squirrely."

Jaune leapt to his feet and turned around. He felt nervous when he saw the officer from the night before.

"You still hanging around here?" he asked.

"Yes sir," Jaune said, "but I'm leaving soon! Going to go meet my dad."

"That so?" The officer settled his hands on his belt and narrowed his eyes. "And where you staying in the meantime?"

"The motel."

"BogginHome?"

"Yes sir."

The officer chuckled tersely. "That place still a mess?"

"Yes sir."

"Figures." He looked Jaune in the eye, which made him fidget uncomfortably. "And when you leaving?"

"Two days."

The gruff old officer scratched his big bushy beard. "Alright then. Buy some things and throw a few more lien into the local economy, then skedaddle."

"I don't have any lien."

The officer scowled. "Then just don't cause any trouble before you skedaddle."

"Can do." Jaune nodded one time, two time, three times, several more times. "No trouble!"

They heard a blood-curdling scream coming from the direction of the lighthouse, the beach.

"What the?" The officer put his hand on the pistol by his side and ran toward the scream. Jaune followed closely behind.

They rushed out the park and down the street, where they saw another man sprinting away from the beach and up the road. He waved his arms. "Grimm!" he shouted, voice full of panic and fear. "Grimm coming from the ocean!"

Trying to befriend local squirrels. Much dastardly, very evil. Me, I don't go near the squirrels in my city. They sorta scare me. Little things will stare you down even though you're a hundred times their size. I don't mess with anything that shows no fear.