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Crazy Molayne Bamboozled Into Giving Directions... Officer Jenny Follows Her Nose... All Aboard the Desert Bus

Things only started to get serious for Moon Child when a computer nerd named Molayne came galloping out of the Observatory at her on crazily long, thin legs, swatting at the air and screaming curses like a lunatic scarecrow.

"Ass," Molayne roared at Moon Child. The foam of pure rage flecked his lips and chin. He stopped a few feet from Moon Child and gave his own hair a frustrated pull. "Bitch, dick! Shit! Bitch," Molayne said.

"What's your problem, Dweebo?" Moon Child asked. She put Rotom protectively back in her bag just in case this strange guy decided he wanted an ass-kicking right here in front of the Observatory.

"Go away!" Molayne shrieked. "Soffy and I never should have given you that Z-Crystal, cock!" His head and shoulder jumped involuntarily. "Dick, shit, dick!"

"Why not? Who are you?"

"You don't even remember me?" Molayne cried. Molayne was wearing a thick pair of prescription dork glasses, and Moon Child noticed that one of the lenses was even more cracked than Rotom. "Soffy and I are Captains!" Molayne yelled at her. "You passed our trial, and we powered you up. Cock! And then what do you do? Steal deities!" Molayne shuddered and slapped at one of his legs for a moment. He looked like he was fighting a swarm of invisible bees. Moon Child felt sorry for Molayne. He had clearly been up all night doing weird things. She decided she wouldn't hurt him—as long as he gave her directions.

"Say, which way to the Ruins of Abundance?" she asked.

"What!? Piss! So you can go steal Tapu Bulu, too?"

"Not at all! Of course not. I only want to talk to him."

"About what," Molayne demanded. One of his eyelids was twitching wildly.

"All kinds of important stuff. Nvidia versus AMD, good deals on Steam, emulating Windows on OS X—"

Molvayne had begun to whine and clutch at his neck and sway back and forth while Moon Child talked. "No!" he screamed. "Dick! You're trying to fool me! You don't care about any of that stuff!"

"—and I especially want to ask him about Linux. I have a lot of Linux questions."

Molvayne threw his head back and howled into the sky. He knew he was beaten.

"East of Tapu Village," he said. "Through the desert. Shit. Oh, ass. You little monster! Don't ever come back here."

"Thanks, mister!" Moon Child called brightly as she got back on Charizard and lifted off. "By the way, Linux sucks!"

Molayne's dwindling scream of rage was music to Moon Child's ears as she sailed down the mountain on a curtain of breeze and mellow morning sunlight.

Youngster Joey was having a lot of fun, too. He and Officer Jenny both. They'd fully embraced their new destinies as agents of chaos in the service of the dark lord Moon Child, and they had hatched all sorts of wacky plans to help her out on the ride over to Ula'ula. They also got deep into Jenny's emergency stash of mescaline. By the time the boat docked and they were running down the ramp, pushing people out of the way and convulsing with mischievous laughter, their pupils looked like the mouths of caves and they were both drenched in sweat and ectoplasm.

"She's that way!" Officer Jenny screamed happily. "Oh, I can smell her! I can smell her thoughts right now!"

"I can smell her too," Youngster Joey announced. People moved around the psychedelic lovebirds in wide, cautious arcs. A moat had encircled them. Their obvious strangeness was isolating, and it made Youngster Joey very nervous. The last thing he wanted was a bunch of cops crawling up his butt.

"We have to go to her right now, this very second, without an instant's hesitation," he told Jenny very seriously and dragged her by the elbow through the crowd toward the bus stop. "I've just sent two messages to Moon Child, and got one in response," he went on. "Telepathically, I mean."

"What was the first message?"

"I asked her if we were indeed smelling her thoughts—"

"Stupid question," Officer Jenny pointed out, "because I know I was."

"And you were right. She has replied that the thoughts were, in fact, hers. Unless—" Here a realization came over Youngster Joey that turned his muscles to rigid fibrous frozen slabs and speared his brainstem with a bolt of pure paranoia. "—Unless the person who replied wasn't Moon Child at all—"

Officer Jenny screamed. They got on the bus along with a group of about five other people.

"Awwwwll aboard the Desert Bus," the bus driver roared into the PA system. "This bus is heading for the desert."

Youngster Joey sucked in breath. He'd had a scary time in a desert on mescaline once. He'd had to eat his way through a Snorlax that had blocked his path, and then someone had put him in jail with a bunch of truculent Cue Balls who had started an argument about literature which ended in a brawl that left three of their number dead and six more horribly maimed.

"Relax," Officer Jenny told him.

"I can't relax!"

"You have to. For the good of the nation. I mean—" she corrected herself, "—for the good of Moon Child. For the bad of the nation."

Youngster Joey slowly pressed himself into the seat and began to relax.

"Desert Bus don't stop for eight hours," the bus driver said. "No pause. No breaks. No nothin'. Just desert and bus until we get there."

The doors slammed shut, and the bus rumbled off down the highway into whipping sheets of sand and grit.