Carl stepped out of Ronnie Anne and Gwen's room. Ronnie Anne had told him to run so he could return as quickly as possible, but he was choosing to walk instead because he didn't care about the family meeting that his older female cousin had suddenly called. Everyone in the family was squeezing into the tiny room for the meeting, so taking his time before he came back also gave him more time to not have to feel cramped. The reason Carl was told to temporarily leave was because there was one more person Ronnie Anne wanted at the meeting, despite the fact this person was not a relative, at least not yet.
After Carl went up the fire escape and snuck into Adelaide's bedroom, he unsurprisingly found her lying in bed and with pajamas on but wide awake. Little kids not feeling tired when their parents make them go to bed has always been a thing, but Adelaide had it much worse than most kids across the multiverse. There were hundreds of strict rules her parents enforced on her, such as having an early bedtime. For some reason, Mr. and Mrs. Chang never treated Sid or Melbourne this way. It was as if Adelaide was under some sort of curse that would cause some major catastrophe if she got too happy and her parents were trying to prevent it. She wouldn't mind the unfair treatment so much if they would just tell her what the reason for it was.
She couldn't even rebel by not going to bed because there was nothing fun she could do in her room without her parents knowing. Bedtime basically turned Adelaide's room into a miniature and non-fatal version of the dystopia seen in A Quiet Place. Every night, all she could do was lie in bed and hope that she would either fall asleep or something that would entertain her happened to happen. This was one of the nights when the latter occurred.
As quietly as he could, Carl switched on the light. The sudden swap from dark to light obviously hurt Adelaide's eyes for a brief moment. Once that mild pain had subsided, she looked over at the light switch to see who had flipped it. Spotting Carl brought a small smile to her face and she knew she was in for a good time. "What's up?" she asked in a hush. "Does Dick need our help with a homework assignment or something?" she randomly guessed.
Whispering, Carl answered by saying "Ronnie Anne called a family meeting in her room for some reason and she wants you there too," which most certainly did not bring a tear of joy to one of Adelaide's eyes. It did, however, make her grin again. "Let's get you outta here."
Adelaide gently stepped out of bed and tiptoed over to the open window with Carl. After it had been shut and they were outside on the fire escape, they were free to talk as loudly as they wished. "Thanks for coming to get me," she said while looking down, slightly sheepishly. "What's the meeting about?"
Since he had been randomly selected to go fetch the last guest before Ronnie Anne would allow the meeting to begin, he didn't know what it was on. The only two people who did know were the anger-prone teen in purple and the person typing this. To answer Adelaide, Carl said "Your guess is as good as mine."
"Maybe my sister's finally over Ronnie Anne and now she wants everybody to know," Adelaide said sarcastically, thinking it was something that couldn't happen in a billion years. Carl slightly chuckled.
When Ronnie Anne saw Carl and Adelaide reach their destination, she began the Casagrande/Santiago/Chang/WhateverGwen'slastnameis family meeting at once. "Show of hands. Who here saw the recent new episode of The Casagrandes known as Guilt Trip?" she asked. No one but her raised an arm, or wing, in Sergio's case. "Very well," continued Ronnie Anne. "I expected at least one of you to need some filling in since there's so many people here."
She then went on to explain the situation. It had been several days since she saw the episode but it was still on her mind constantly. It was very rare for her to find an episode of The Casagrandes that she enjoyed watching. She convinced herself that the reason why was that being a perfectionist movie director made her prone to nitpicking and overreacting to minor flaws. Y Universe Ronnie Anne would be excellent at CinemaSins. However, no matter how much she internally denied it, at least part of the reason for her disdain for the show was due to jealousy of the real Ronnie Anne's much happier life.
So what was it about Guilt Trip that was sticking with her? A brand new character, Fridgey, was introduced in it. A very short time after she finished watching it, Ronnie Anne deduced that the Y Universe was very likely to get a counterpart to Fridgey and soon. However, she had still yet to find one. That's what the meeting she called was about. "Any information any of you can find on locating Y Universe Fridgey will be rewarded greatly," she stated with pride after explaining what was on her mind to everyone.
"That implies you're gonna give the reward to the information," CJ said while raising his hand, making Ronnie Anne's eyes roll.
While giving her cousin a quick thumbs up to acknowledge what he said and let him know he had a point, Ronnie Anne asked "So, who's in?" Ronnie Anne wasn't expecting her family to be into this silly thing she suddenly wanted to do, but she had lucked out. As she looked around the room, she saw almost nothing but happy faces. Gwen was the only odd one out, but it wasn't uncommon for Gwen to frown even when she wasn't actually upset.
"I'm on board with this," said Carl.
"Yeah, the more the merrier!" Rosa added in.
"I've been bored lately and this'll give me something to do," said Hector.
Nearly everyone began chattering about Ronnie Anne's idea together until Maria stopped them. "Alright, alright. It's getting a little late, so I feel it would be best if we waited until tomorrow," she suggested.
"It's not late!" Adelaide whined.
"True, but it's still too late to go out and start searching for someone who might not even exist," Maria responded. She had more to say, but her daughter interrupted.
"Oh, he exists! Name one character from The Casagrandes, Pokémon, or TDR that DOESN'T have a Y Universe counterpart!" said an excited Ronnie Anne.
Uninterested in this unlike everyone else in the room, Gwen wanted to name some characters who can't be found in the Y Universe to show that Ronnie Anne's argument didn't hold any water. Gwen was right, not every character from The Casagrandes had been seen in their universe. Unfortunately for her, Gwen wasn't able to come up with any names. While she tried to, a majority of the other people in the room rushed past her to go to bed so they could wake up early the next day and start the search for Fridgey.
A few days came and went with Fridgey still yet to be found. Fridgey had no social media presence and no one they talked to knew him. With so much time gone by, the number of people on the hunt had drastically reduced. Hector and Carl gave up before the first day had even concluded. Hector had realized that being bored was the lesser of two evils between it and running around a city in search of someone they didn't need to find. Carl surrendered simply because he decided he was too cool for this. The rest of the family had stayed on the search for longer, but due to their failed efforts to locate Fridgey, they knew they had to stop and get back to their lives.
The only people still trying to make this happen were Ronnie Anne, Adelaide, and Carlitos. The oldest of the three paced back in forth in her living room, trying to think of a new tactic they could use. "There's gotta be something we can do," she said with a finger on her chin.
"Did you ask your dad to help?" asked Adelaide.
"Of course!" Ronnie Anne angrily shouted, out of a loss of patience, not anger at her friend. "I wanted everyone in the whole family involved, including the people who don't live here, so I told him all about this the morning after the family meeting. Thanks for the suggestion though."
"Why do you want him to help anyway?" Carlitos asked Adelaide, feeling that specifically Arturo had nothing to add to the table over anyone else.
"Don't humans get radar powers if they get brought back to life after being dead for eleven years?" Adelaide asked, getting everyone in the room, including the people who weren't part of the conversation to stare at her.
The only one not weirded out by what she had said was Carlitos. "I've never been told that. But I'm basically still a baby, so there's probably lots of stuff I don't know."
"It's not true, Carlitos," Maria chimed in while getting up from the table and walking over to the kids. "Where did you hear that, Adelaide?"
"It's one of the thing's Melbourne told me he learned yesterday when he was in Carlota's body," Adelaide answered.
Upon hearing her name, Carlota came closer and said "And you believed your one-month-old brother, why?" in an unintentionally rude way, causing Adelaide to look away and down at the floor in embarrassment. "Sorry," Carlota added in.
Wanting to get positive vibes rolling, Ronnie Anne chose to be optimistic about the little vampire's rather out there idea. "Hey, maybe one-month-olds are the real geniuses of the world. Let's try your idea, Ada." Feeling like the search for Fridgey was finally coming to an end, Adelaide and Carlitos cheered. "I just gotta go ask Bobby and Gwen if they wanna come first."
"WHAT?!" exclaimed Adelaide. "Bobby gave up and Gwen never wanted anything to do with this. Why would they suddenly have a change of heart?"
"This has nothing to do with finding Fridgey. Bobby and Gwen always come with me when I go see my dad. They've got a lot of missed time with him to catch up on," clarified Ronnie Anne. "So if there ends up being a change of heart, it would be that they don't want to see him."
She didn't see it coming, but Adelaide felt stupid. She was one of Ronnie Anne's best friends, and being told this information made her feel that it was something she should already know. "I am such a bad friend!" she cried.
"No you're not," Ronnie Anne consoled, cheering up Adelaide in an oddly quick instant.
In her and Ronnie Anne's room, Gwen was sitting in her egg chair and holding her favorite toy. When Adelaide first saw her playing with it, she immensely wanted to play with it too. Unwilling to share, Gwen went online and bought another one for her. She didn't mind paying at all thanks to her status as a rich reality show star. Coming up with easy solutions to those kinds of problems was Gwen's specialty. She had thought of one for the Fridgey issue too, but wasn't sure if doing it was the right decision.
She had stayed there at the Casagrande building temporarily for Christmas, then she moved in in January, and it was now February. The others already wanted to get another new person in their lives, Fridgey, despite the fact they just got one, her. Maybe if Gwen pretended that that hurt her feelings, it would make everyone come to realize that they weren't appreciating her. Perhaps she could go the extra mile and run away. Nothing would make them realize they were being silly more than having to search the city for someone they actually had a reason to care about would.
However, it didn't matter. She still didn't care about putting an end to this. Even if she did care, it was bound to end soon anyway since there were only three people still not convinced to stop. Even with coming up with solutions being her specialty, she was always slow when it came to putting them into action.
Gwen heard a knock. When she opened the door to her chair, she saw Ronnie Anne and Bobby smiling at her. "We're gonna go see Dad. You coming?" the brother and sister said in unison.
Gwen responded with nothing more than a very deadpan "Whatever." She shut her chair's door and her half siblings pushed it down as slowly and carefully as possible. They then rolled it out the door, which Gwen was cool with.
When they saw them leave the apartment to go see Arturo, most other members of the family had no thoughts about it. On the other hand, there was one person it mattered greatly to. "Man, I am so tired of this dumb Fridgey thing that it feels like I need a blanket," said Carl. "I've gotta make this stop!"
"Because you wanna hang out with Adelaide but she's only cared about finding Fridgey lately?" asked Carlota. Carl ignored his sister and left for the cardboard box store so he wouldn't have to confirm or deny if she was right.
He bought a tall cardboard box, spray painted it white, wrote some random letters on it in multiple colors, and showed it off once everyone was home. Miraculously, nearly everyone who wasn't already aware of his plan fell for it. The ruse didn't last long, however. Carl made the mistake of teasing everyone for being gullible by saying "I didn't go to the cardboard box store today, if that's what you were thinking," which made the others start to be suspicious.
"Why aren't his magnets spelling new words?" Ronnie Anne asked after several seconds of the letters remaining stationary.
"And I can't get his doors to open," Adelaide said after she tried both sides.
"And a third thing that proves this is a fake because it always has to be exactly three things for some reason!" shouted Bobby.
Giving up, Carl sighed and knocked the box over. "Look. We're already very different from the original versions of us, so would it really be the end of the world if we let them have one thing that's just their own?" he asked in an unintentionally condescending manner.
"Different in what ways?" asked Adelaide. She had never seen one single episode of Nickelodeon's The Casagrandes, so she knew very little about it.
Carl started listing some facts about it for her right away. "There's no Gwen, there's no Pokémon, Sergio's the one interested in making movies instead of Ronnie Anne, and you're not a..." He had to stop himself there. He almost spilled the beans on how the original Adelaide is most likely a human. The show never said she was, but common sense made it obvious. If Adelaide learned this, it would put her in an instantaneous world-ending rage and Carl knew this. Letting her find out about Froggy 2 also would've been a mistake. "...person who wears a hat," he said to prevent disaster. And he didn't even have to lie to her, which he always felt bad about doing during the uncommon times when he had to.
"If the original me doesn't have a hat, that makes me better than her," commented Adelaide.
"You already were," Carl corrected. "So what do you all say?" he asked. "Let's stop caring about Fridgey and appreciate how we have each other. And then let's ceremoniously burn Fake Fridgey here to symbolize how we're putting these shenanigans to bed."
"No," Ronnie Anne said bluntly. She then bolted outside to continue her futile search. This time, she did it in song.
One way or another
I'm gonna find you
I'm gonna getcha, getcha, getcha, getcha
One way or another
I'm gonna win you
I'm gonna getcha, getcha, getcha, getcha
Fridgey, oh, Fridgey
I need to see you
I need to see you, see you, see you
From Anthony or his brother
I'm gonna get you
I'm gonna get you, I'll get you
I'll find the cold metal rectangle
And if your magnets say you're hurt
I'll make them eat dirt
Yeah!
It was not uncommon for singing a song in the Y Universe to make something magically happen, so Ronnie Anne was actually surprised when she wasn't suddenly hugging Fridgey after the song was over. Out of frustration, she kicked down a fire hydrant, making her get bombarded with water. "FRIDGEY!" she slowly shouted, wishing she could find him and being bleakly unaware of the fact there's no Fridgey for her to find.
She never learned the error of her ways and refused to give up until she died 97 years later.
