8 -

Louise scurried to the door wondering who the idiot was who was pounding on it instead of decently ringing the doorbell; which was when the doorbell went off. She was really puzzled by that as the thing had never worked before; she was also puzzled when she opened the door because the rotund black and red clad person on the door step was no one she knew. Well, it had red hair confined in a ponytail, but it wasn't Denise as the color was ... well... purplish-pinkish. Pale blue eyes regarded her from behind bifocal lenses and the rotund one grinned.

"Hi. I'm dragon," she introduced herself.

Louise felt her jaw drop. Wait a minute. Wasn't dragon supposed to be at work? In the US somewhere? She recovered the jaw and nodded.

"You're Louise, right?"

"Uhm ... er ... yes?" Somehow she sounded uncertain even in her own ears.

"You said you wanted to come along."

"Along? Come ... " Her eyes rounded in wild surmise. "You mean ... but ... I'm ... er ... story ... middle ... shoot." Incoherency was annoying.

"Wellll ... if you don't want to come ... I guess I could put up with it."

"Mom, if she's busy, she's busy. We can do this another time," came the oddly reasonable voice of the SQ Addict as she peeked around her mom's slightly reduced girth and waved. "Or we can include her in another lurk."

dragon sighed, which was spoiled by the evil twinkle in her eyes and the grin that immediately followed. "OK. If you're in the throes, you're in the throes. Here. When you finally get around to the lurking thing, use this." dragon handed her what looked like a graphing calculator. she frowned and glared at it. "Wait. Not that." She dug in the backpack she was carrying while muttering something about teenaged sons, math classes and Onion Festivals. "Rini!"

The SQ Addict handed her a smaller item, still with a confusing number of buttons, which dragon then handed to Louise. "Oh, and make sure this gets delivered to The Man when you do go." She dropped a shimmery black box into Louise's arms.

"What's in it?"

dragon grinned bigger. Were humans supposed to have that many teeth? Sharp ... Louise shook her head. "You figure it out," dragon told her. "Bye."

dragon pressed several buttons on her own device and looked puzzled. Behind her Louise could hear the telly changing channels. She chuckled, then burst out laughing as dragon figured out what she'd done and rummaged about for a minute before finding the right button box. With a wave, dragon and the SQ Addict vanished from the doorstep.

"I just had a first hand hallucination," Louise muttered to herself before looking down at the box in her arms and the contraption in her hand. "A really solid, insane hallucination."

She lifted the corner of the box to peek in. Oh, my. Her grin was positively manic as she returned to her writing.

"Mom."

"Yessss?" dragon kinda hissed as she tried to figure out exactly what had gone wrong with her coordinates.

"You, er, noticed, I take it."

"A building tall lizard is damned hard to ignore! Nice Godzilla," she muttered as she tried to re-enter the correct coordinates to get them to Gay's place in London.

"Here Lizard, Lizard, Lizard," Rini said with a giggle in a bad Mexican accent.

"You are not the Taco Bell chihuahua," dragon admonished as she finally got them out of there just before the gargantuan lizard put a foot down where they had been a moment earlier.

However, they still weren't at Gay's place ...

"Mom."

"Uhm, yes."

"Two moons?"

"Er ... apparently."

"You can't have Kanda Yu and Allen is too young."

dragon snerked again. "Technically Kanda's younger than Allen ... Here Tyki, Tyki, Tyki ... "

"Shhhhhhh!" Rini's giggles somewhat aborted the sterness of her shushing sound. She really didn't want dragon to locate the sometimes ambivalent Noah known as Tyki Mikk. "SHADO, Mom." She grabbed the tesserect from dragon's hand, sighed and looked long suffering as she realized that somehow the thing had gotten stuck on anime instead of sci-fi.

Fold.

Gay's place. Now to turn it into a shimmering, decadent tent.

Gay Ellis walked into her flat after a long day and stopped dead. She'd heard rumor of odd things happening to people. This was definitely odd. Yards and yards and yards of translucent glittering, shimmering fabric had been attached to the ceiling and then swagged back to the walls forming a sort of tent in her living room. An opalescent chandelier hung at center, pillows in velvets and silks had been tossed everywhere and a gleaming turkish style tea set sat on Persian rug now covering her floor.

Damn.

If this was an alien intruder ...

Damn.