Brittany actually just assumes the noise is LT, because while she's been cutting the edges off the purple blanket from the living room to make a cape, he's been messing around with her marble maze tower in a constant staccato of plinks.
"There's somebody at your window," LT says, and she looks over to see his nose pressed curiously against the window glass.
"What ho? A foe?" Brittany bobs and weaves over while she ties the ends of the blanket around her neck. She pulls her tie-dye bandana low over her eyebrows and squishes her nose against the window next to LT.
In the dim yellow porch light, she makes out a silhouette. A little one. "Could it possibly be Awesome Girl's arch-nemesis, Annoying Girl?"
But, when she squints, she realizes it's not Rachel at all. "Santana!" she says, struggling to lift the window.
Turns out LT's leaning on its top ridge, holding it down with his weight. "It is Annoying Girl," he growls, and she's not sure if he's kidding or serious or both. Probably both.
"No it's not," she whines, swatting at his big stupid arms. He wheels back from the window with this martyred sigh and she heaves again.
When the window still doesn't budge, she eyes it suspiciously. "It must have been cursed by the evil Mom Lady," she narrates in her lowest, most ominous voice. "C'mon, Captain Kitty, you gotta give me a hand!"
LT is affronted. "Captain Kitty? What kind of name is that?"
"Whatever," Brittany says, "just help me!"
Between the two of them, they yank the window open enough for Brittany to wedge her head through, if she turns sideways. "Hi Santana!" she yells down.
Santana waves and gives her a funny smile. "Hi Brittany!"
"I'm not Brittany," Brittany protests. "I'm Awesome Girl."
"Oh," Santana says, taking a moment to think. "Well, come down and play with me!"
With a hesitant glance at LT, Brittany turns back and says, "What do you wanna play?"
"You're grounded," LT reminds her, crossing his arms like Mom Lady.
Brittany rolls her eyes and ignores him while Santana says, "I dunno, who cares? Come down!"
"Can we play Brittanyball?" asks Brittany.
"Absolutely not!" yells LT with his fur sticking up. "That's our game, Brittany!"
"What is that?" Santana's asking.
In her adult voice, Brittany sniffs, "I can't tell you."
Santana crosses her arms and says, "Then how can we play?"
Brittany's about to explain that, duh, not knowing how to play is how you play, but she gets cut off by someone calling, "Santana! What are you doing?"
Mom Lady must have a sidekick now, because this lady has the same hairstyle even though hers is black, and she's wearing the same black shoes and she's an adult and therefore most probably evil. "You can't just run outside like this! It's after dark!" she's scolding Santana, crouched beside her under Brittany's window.
"Quick, turn off the lights," Brittany whispers to LT, peering through the corner of the window because she's eavesdropping.
"I know, I'm sorry," she hears Santana say while LT turns the lights off. Then, suddenly, Santana's mom stands up and takes Santana's hand, and they're walking across Brittany's yard toward the side of the house. Santana looks up sadly and waves; Brittany waves back.
The room lights up again, and Brittany turns to see LT looking pouty. "You can't play Brittanyball with her," he complains. "That's our thing."
Guilty but disappointed, Brittany mumbles, "Brittanyball isn't D.O.T.S. business. I can ask her to play."
"She's just a dumb girl," LT says, wounded. "She'd probably mess it up."
"She's not dumb," Brittany says and pushes the bandana up away from her eyes. "Clown Teacher always has her do problems on the board."
LT rolls his eyes. "School isn't like Brittanyball," he points out in his duh voice. "Brittanyball is way cooler and she'd totally mess it up."
"Well," Brittany thinks aloud, "if she messes it up, I'll make her go away."
The hurt drains from LT's face, and he hops onto her bed with an apathetic shrug. "Doesn't matter, 'cause she's probably grounded, now, too."
"Getting grounded doesn't mean anything," Brittany points out in her duh voice. "I go outside all the time when I'm grounded."
"Yeah, but she's a goody-two-shoes," LT says wisely. "Goody-two-shoes-es always listen to their parents."
Feeling strangely insulted, Brittany shoots back, "You don't know she's a goody-two-shoes."
LT raises his paw and says, "If your teacher likes her, she's obviously a goody-two-shoes."
It's hard to argue with that. Brittany sulks. "I never said he liked her."
"Teachers always have kids they like do problems on the board."
"How do you know that?" Brittany's exasperated. "You never went to school."
LT shrugs mildly. "Instinct. Cats are born knowing this stuff."
Brittany considers him while she tugs at the cape where it chokes her. "Whoa."
"Yeah." LT preens happily. "It's pretty awesome."
At lunch, Santana climbs in next to her on the bench while Brittany's dumping out a Tupperware box and an apple onto the table next to her 2% milk.
"Whatcha got?" asks Santana, so cheerful it makes her uneasy.
Snapping open the Tupperware lid reveals cold leftover lasagna. Brittany wrinkles her nose and groans, "Monkey guts again?"
Santana shifts on her seat and her expression clouds over. "Those aren't monkey guts," she says tentatively, peering over Brittany's shoulder at the container. "Looks like lasagna."
"Shows what you know," Brittany says, digging her fork deep into the cheese and pulling up into the air so sticky threads stretch in the air. "See? Totally guts." Santana looks pretty close to wigging out, so Brittany turns her hand to show Santana the pasta chunk stuck to her fork and whispers, "This is probably the last thing he ate."
"Gross!" whines Santana. Her head whips around, but Mr. Schuester's nowhere in sight.
Brittany shoves a forkful into her mouth and chews. "It's okay," she says happily, "They're totally good for you and stuff."
"That's totally lasagna," Santana insists, still skeptical from where she's leaned away from Brittany as far as possible.
"Monkey guts," Brittany reiterates, chomping noisily. She looks over at Santana's lunch and eyes the sandwich with exaggerated distrust. "That's probably the monkey's brains."
With a loud gasp, Santana recoils, then creeps back toward her sandwich cautiously. She peels the bread apart and eyes the dark red jelly. "You think?" she whispers, but her eyes are glittery again when she looks over at Brittany.
"Um, yeah," Brittany answers; her voice falters and she's not sure why.
The fear dissolves from Santana's face while she picks the sandwich up and takes a big bite. "I bet it'll make me even smarter," she says.
"No!" yells Brittany instinctively, but she can't think of a reason, and Santana just grins at her smugly, so Brittany takes another monster bite of her stupid lasagna and shuts up.
It doesn't last, though, and it only takes a minute before Santana's asking, "So what's Brittanyball?"
"It's a secret," Brittany says while she forces her milk carton open. She notes with frustration that Santana's is opened in a crisp rhombus, while hers has a mouth like a crater.
When she glances over again to compare, she startles to see Santana sitting right up next to her. "I can keep a secret," Santana whispers reverently, dark eyes all shiny again.
Brittany jerks away and goes back to wolfing down the cold lasagna. It's clammy and pasty, and Brittany reminds herself that the meat from the giant crabs she killed on the shore is the most nutritious thing she's found on the island, and she has to choke it down. Spacegirl Spice needs her energy if she's going to investigate the caves under the volcano after lunch.
"You can tell me," Santana says, yanking Brittany back to the lunch table.
She scowls at the interruption. "Maybe I don't wanna tell you," she snaps, pouting into her milk.
Santana huffs and a frown finally settles on her face. "You don't have to be a jerk!" she says, shoving her lunch back into her bag and stomping away from the table.
Brittany keeps pouting at her space crab meat, and she can't help but feel like she's left something important behind.
Spacegirl Spice is exploring the alien caves when the resident Momzork ruins it. She's about to go all Lewis and Clark and get a sketchpad to note the odd, lamp-like shape of the stalagmites when the Momzork garbles something loud that rings against the walls.
She ambles through the rooms, examining the furniture where it rests on the ceiling above her head, and she realizes with a jolt of adrenaline and fear that her speed warp through the mountain must have inverted her galactic polarity, leaving her rooted to the ceiling!
Trusty Spacecat Spack looks down at her from above with his hands on his hips and she hisses, "Help me down!"
"I thought you didn't need any help," he says, pouty and hurt.
"I told you, it's not safe in the caves, and I only have one blaster," Spice repeats for the gazillionth time, rolling her eyes. "Now help me down before the aliens come back."
It takes a little wheedling, but Spack finally reaches his long arms up and pulls her back down. "I thought I'd finally fixed that," Spice huffs conversationally while they creep through the cavern toward the voice.
Spack agrees, "I did think replacing the magnets would make a difference. I guess we miscalculated the gravitronomics."
"Brittany! I said come to dinner!" Momzork roars. Spice presses back against the wall, turns her blaster up to Medium Well, and hurries up, pulling Spack along behind her.
When she makes it to the table, approaching the interrogation hot seat and climbing onto it, Momzork chastises, "Took you long enough. I told you ten minutes ago. Did you remember to wash your hands?"
What do the aliens want with her hands? "Yes," Spice lies sullenly, surveying the gross green lumpiness on her plate. She hopes it's covering up something edible, like pepperoni pizza, because there's no way her stomach can process alien food like this.
Momzork isn't buying it, but the tall, willow Grakdad decides to try his hand at Bad Cop and says, "Let's see your hands, young lady."
Spice sets her jaw, tucks her blaster between her legs, and holds her hands up for a short flash. Momzork's tentacle grabs her by the wrist and examines the dirty creases of her palms. "Brittany!"
No way she's putting up with that, and she sticks her tongue out at the Momzork in a show of defiance. Before she knows it, the Grakdad's extricated himself from the chair and he's dragging her into a room full of chrome appliances. It must be the torture chamber, and Spice analyzes the escape routes while the Grakdad pushes her onto a stool and over the edge of a sink. He scrubs her hands under the water and Spice feels the protective Earth oils slide off down the drain, leaving her exposed and vulnerable to the toxic air molecules of Zartron-9.
Of course, she follows her training and keeps her panic and protests to herself. She allows the Grakdad to lead her back to the detention chamber, and she settles back on the platform in front of the green parasite poorly disguised as food.
"How was school?" Momzork asks with her hardest voice.
Spice shrugs and her eyes alight on a miniaturized but sharp pronged bayonet. Her captors ignore the way she wields it ominously over the green bio-agent. She prods the glop cautiously with her weapon and the way it moves suggests enough sentience to be dangerous. "Eeugh," she says under her breath as her eyes go wide.
"Now what?" asks the Momzork. Spice flinches at her stupidity.
"It wiggled," she deflects, keeping her gaze pinned on the "food" suspiciously and her blade poised to strike.
Zounds! Momzork isn't buying it. And an experimental poke to test the consistency tells Spice that there's definitely no pepperoni pizza underneath waiting to redeem this culinary disaster. At least her kidnappers on Zog had the decency to pretend they were feeding her something edible.
"Brittany, don't be silly. Your food did not wiggle."
It wobbles again, as if to mock her. Spice snarls at the provocation and mashes it down with her fork violently.
"Brittany!" Grakdad shouts, louder than she expected. It shocks her into freezing and looking up. "Stop playing with your food and eat the nice dinner your mother made!"
They think they've won when Spice sinks into a silent glare and shovels the food onto the violent utensil they've provided. Spack, however, is coiled under the table right by her feet, and everybody knows Spacecat stomachs can handle anything.
It's not that she means to end up next to Santana again, but it's the only open spot, and her lunch bag has turned into a kid-munching monster with locomotive power, so she leaps in under the table next to Santana's feet.
"Brittany, what the heck?" says Santana loudly, chomping on her usual peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Brittany shushes her, swatting her shins, and hisses, "Don't talk so loud! It'll know I'm here!"
There's a pause where Brittany just hears her classmates' chatter in the background—and she notices the awesome Hamster Huey Band-Aids stretched over Santana's knee—and then Santana whispers surreptitiously, "What're you hiding from?"
"My mom sent an evil spy device instead of my lunch," she whispers back. "It's trying to eat my arm off and then self-destruct! I need to get to the armory so I can fight it off."
After another moment, where Santana swings her legs while she thinks and almost decks Brittany in the nose, and Santana ducks down again to say, "Would a thermos work?"
"Yeah!" says Brittany eagerly. She swipes it when Santana holds it out and sprints back to her table.
By the time she's beaten the lunch decoy into a purple jelly pulp, Santana's come up behind her to stare.
"Here's your thermos," Brittany says, handing it back and proudly displaying her kill. "Look, it's bleeding jelly!"
Santana wrinkles her nose. "Gross," she says, but she keeps staring at it, weirdly curious.
It makes Brittany kind of uncomfortable, so she says thanks one more time and scurries outside for recess.
"Nuh-uh! You just entered the green zone!"
LT squeaks, insulted. "What's the green zone?" he demands, clutching the volleyball protectively and adjusting his eye mask.
"If you're not wearing green, you can't leave!" Brittany yells, circling in on him.
"Well, the green zone is surrounded by the naked zone, so you can't come get me!" he says and sticks his tongue out.
He's just mad because he doesn't wear clothes, so he can't wear green. But he's miscalculated gravely; Brittany shrugs and pulls her shirt off.
LT backs into the corner of the green zone while Brittany kicks her shoes off, and she's got her pants down to her ankles when her mom comes running outside, yelling.
She tries to explain, but her mom never understands the rules in Brittanyball, and she definitely never understands naked rules.
It gets her stuck in her room until dinner.
Again.
Way later, Brittany thinks she hears a pebble against her window again, but right when she goes to check, her mom storms in and drags her to take her bath.
Her mom keeps watch while she cleans—because last time she flooded the bathroom floor during her aquatic reinterpretation of "Singin' in the Rain"—and glares mildly from where she sits on the closed toilet seat. Brittany mostly ignores her and submerges half her face in the weak bubbles, blowing a slew of her own and burbling, "Mayday on the SS Raptor, send help."
Brittany mimics a radio noise—"Krr-chk"—and makes the second voice nasally: "Coast guard, Raptor, what's the sitch?"
"Sea's unnaturally choppy," she replies as the Raptor while she waves her hands underneath the toy boat. The waves make it rock ominously. "Suspect subaquatic unrest. Request backup and investigation."
In the corner, her mom checks her watch, but Brittany ignores her while her arms turn into giant kraken tentacles. "Sounds fishy, Raptor. What are you—Eeee!" Brittany shrieks for the passengers as she sloshes water over their deck.
"I'm drowning! I'm—glurg," Brittany wails, blowing more bubbles and thrashing the boat about in the water.
"Don't slosh water out of the tub," her mom scolds.
With a sulky glare, Brittany restrains her movements a little and goes back to shrieking for the boat passengers. "Coast guard, can you hear me? It's—oh God, it's—Nooo!" She flops her arm over the top of the boat and drags it down under the water, flopping forward so she's hugging it to her chest against the tub bottom.
It only takes half a second for her mom to pull her upright. Brittany pouts. "I wanted to hold my breath," she whines.
"I think you've been in there long enough," her mom says tiredly, ignoring her complaints and dragging her onto the bath mat. She helps a resistant Brittany towel off and leans over to unplug the tub.
Brittany looks at her fingertips while her mom tucks the toy boat onto the shelf. "Look," she says, holding her palms up to her mom and curling them into velociraptor claws. Her voice drops to a growl: "I'm a prune monster! Rarr!"
"Come on, sweetie," her mom says, totally ignoring her crazy awesome prunosaur transformation and dressing her in her pajamas. She takes Brittany's claw, unfazed, and leads her to her room.
Once the lights are out, though, and she's snuggled against LT while her mom clicks the door shut, the raptor claws come in handy.
"Come down, we've got candy!" gurgles one of the monsters under her bed.
LT's fur sticks up and his claws come out, but Brittany leans confidently over the edge of the bed and snarls, "We've got a saber-tooth tiger and a prunosaurus Rex up here, so you better stay under there if you know what's good for you!"
There's quiet murmuring, and then the voice mutters, "Fine, don't eat the candy. See if we care."
Brittany snuggles into LT's warm fuzzy belly and doesn't notice the pebble that slipped inside the open window.