Wellllllllll. Now that we're done with that whole ghastly business, on to the next ghastly business! This is the start of the main kernel this whole mess is trying to get at.

I fear it'll be deadly boring. :S There was a sale at the supermarket, you see; microwavable nostalgia-and-cheese. Couldn't say no.

Annnnnnnnnd Episode 45 is already out in Italian, it appears. I haven't seen it, though gosh knows I'm tempted. But dangit, Morro! Not yet, not yet! I can't have you jumping down the kid's throat already, I still need him for the dragon. XP

GUEST05: Argh. I know the feeling. XS

Hmm, do you have the same email now as back then? If so, that and the password (which can be reset) would get you in even if you don't remember your username.

Heh . . . heh heh. I'm actually conducting some informal research of sorts on that, with a friend. It's not done yet, but based on what we've got so far, you're right, Cole is indeed the closest approximation of an octopus. Unless you count Nya, she leads him. XP

Awww, thanks for the kind words. Let's just say Staff-Possessed Kai said a little too much, and I can and will use it against him whenever possible. :P

I used to dream

I used to glance beyond the stars

Now I don't know where we are

Although I know we've drifted far

-Michael Jackson, "Earth Song." (Ohhh. Well, now we know why Cole loves Michael Jackson. XD)

It took them a full week, but at last they got all the ingredients for the mash. The pileated gullymoss did arrive, in a box so pungently scented that the mailman complained for days afterwards. The pink silica they had bargained from Gravis was confiscated by overzealous customs officials, and they had a jolly old time convincing them to let the stuff go. A few other items they went out to get themselves, splitting up into small hunting parties. They wound up in some pretty bizarre places, haggled with some pretty bizarre people, and got themselves into some pretty bizarre situations. Lloyd nearly got hit by a semi, Kai had an audience with the prime minister of Metalonia (which would've been awesome, had he actually known a word of the local tongue), and Jay and Zane briefly wound up in jail. It was Zane's fault.

"I am never letting you translate anything ever again," said Jay bitterly, stacking baskets of seaweed in the storage room. "Next time, just tell me you're running the Nindroid version of Google Translate instead of saying you can actually speak other languages."

"I was not aware there was a difference," said Zane meekly.

"Yeeeeeah, well."

Finally they double-checked that they had all the ingredients and dug a long trench by the base of the mountain. Skylor had sent them a large vat from the old factory, perfect for their purpose; they balanced it over the trench, built a fire underneath it, and got to work.

First they had to boil the green pinecones for almost a whole day to soften them. Next they had to add some mushrooms, then one-quarter of the seaweed, then a whole host of other ingredients in strange orders. Somebody had to be supervising the cauldron at all times to stir the mix, make sure the water didn't boil off, and maintain the very specific temperature ranges needed at different stages of the recipe. The five ninja and Nya took it in swing shifts, two hours at a time, two shifts a day.

There were way too many difficulties. The mushrooms didn't soften as much as they should have; the water boiled off too fast or too slow; the temperature refused to reach the correct level for the addition of the next ingredient. They all did their best to keep their tempers.

After a long, inconclusive session of debating what to do with the fire (they needed more heat, but were concerned a stronger blaze would burn the mash to the bottom of the vat), Cole finally detached himself from the deliberations and went back to the Bounty. They still had to figure out how to pay for the various ingredients they had bought, and their regular budget would have to be tweaked and twisted significantly to fit around that. There were bills and checks and confirmation slips, plus stacks of legal papers they had to fill out because of the pink silica fiasco, plus permissions and thank-you notes and a host of other frittery paperwork.

It wasn't fun. But it needed to be done, and at the moment Cole would take it over fussing about firewood.

Spreading some of the more urgent papers across the mess hall table, he began to work up a list of their expenses. It was difficult to stay focused, though, and pretty soon he had covered his scratch paper with idle doodles and needed more.

He sighed. There would probably be some blank paper . . . somewhere . . . Maybe Nya had some? But he didn't feel like going to the trouble of hunting Nya down. His glance fell instead on the boxes he'd taken from Lou's attic, still piled in the corner of the mess hall. Ah, maybe there'd be some old paper there? He drew quite a lot when he was a kid, maybe his old sketchpads were still in there somewhere.

As he rummaged through the boxes, his thoughts inevitably turned towards home. A pulse of sadness hit him as he thought about his dad; Cole was still pretending not to know anything about Lou's condition, but he knew he couldn't keep that up for long. Soon he would pretend to find out about it—somehow—and then, whether Lou liked it or not, he was going home to look after him. He couldn't leave his dad to stumble around alone in his time of need. Not a chance.

He forced himself not to think about what else that would entail.

At last his search through the boxes turned up a battered-looking old notebook. His eyes widened—he'd forgotten this thing! Sitting back down at the table, he flipped open the cover eagerly and found his own handwriting scrawled across the front page: Training Logbook.

This old thing! This was where he'd taken notes about the team's progress, wayyyyyyyy way back when they'd first found the Bounty. He still remembered starting a brand-new notebook after the original one burned with the mountaintop monastery.

Already smiling, he tried to turn the first few pages. They were sticky, and he had to peel them apart . . . judging by the stains, that was myrtleberry pie filling. Heh. Zane never missed.

Starting a new journal! read the first line. Long story. We're spending our first night in our new home, this really fantastic shipwreck in the middle of the desert . . .

Forgetting all about the paperwork, Cole flipped through the pages, a nostalgic smile inadvertently glued to his face. There were detailed instructions for how to perform katas, and paraphrasings of important things Sensei Wu had told them, and notes about who'd done well or who'd gotten in trouble that day and would have to be spoken to sternly, and—oh! This was the violet-berry soup recipe that Lloyd had wrecked for him! Yep, there it was: allow to stand for three days, sampling and seasoning regularly . . . Ohhhh, he'd been ticked about that one. The little brat.

Reading his notes from just a few years ago felt bizarre. He couldn't remember writing any of this, and sometimes he couldn't believe it really had been him who wrote it. Dang, he'd been such a dork back then! No, scratch that—slow time training today; Jay's wrist is still sprained from doing cartwheels on the ship's railing—no, they'd all been dorks back then. Were these honestly the same people currently wracking their brains over a mystical dragon potion? Had they . . . had they really changed that much?

They had, hadn't they? Settling back, he allowed himself to sink into reminescence. With reminscence inevitably came comparison, and with comparison came worry.

Jay, good grief. He could barely recognize him. Back in the early days, Jay had been a dynamo, a carefree bundle of sparks; the silliest things could made him laugh. Life was one huge game to him—and while his lack of focus got annoying sometimes, it could give him unexpected insight too. Only Jay could be quirky-minded enough to equate skeletons with training equipment, and thanks to that he'd been the first in the team to master Spinjitzu. "Ka-ching!", if Cole recalled his exact words.

Come to think, he couldn't remember the last time he'd heard Jay supplying his own goofy sound effects while battling.

Jay had always been the funny one, hadn't he? The one who'd casually slurp cotton candy instead of paying attention to a life-or-death battle. The one who saw fit to ride his dragon upside-down on his way into the Underworld. The one who thought a stupid echoing cave was the most hilarious thing of the week, who'd still be snickering about it even as he faced off against a posse of murderous snakes. What had happened to change that into someone forced to maintain his sanity by clinging white-knuckled to a hollow mantra of positive thinking? Back in the Factory, they had all half-jokingly adopted it as their battle cry—but "positive thinking" had started out as the only thing between lightning ninja and nervous breakdown. He no longer laughed; he readily panicked.

Not to mention he'd been especially down ever since that three AM talk with Kai. He no longer made his usual smart-alecky comments at random intervals, and he didn't even look Nya's way much anymore. Even when he did, he usually looked away again hastily, eyes wistful. Such were the perils of dating someone you couldn't get away from.

Then there was Kai. Kai got scary. He had always been a hothead, sure—impatient, reckless, stubborn, an ego about the size of New Ninjago City—and yet there was a very winning earnestness in the way he pulled it off. A kind of frank passion that made you realize (even as you wanted to knock him into next week) that you couldn't really be angry with him. Besides, he'd really matured over his first year. Without at all quelling that burning spirit, he'd learned to temper it for the sake of others; to hear the voices of reason and responsibility as well as the screech of his own passion.

But lately, Kai had suddenly gone all over the place. On one hand, he seemed to have matured even more, gaining a new wisdom. Heck, he'd practically taken Sensei Wu's place as moral backbone of the team during the whole Tech Wu fiasco. But on the other hand, at random intervals he would suddenly seem insane. Cole dared not dwell too long on the memory of that explosion-laden car chase after Pythor and the Nindroids and a truck full of rocket fuel, because frankly it scared him too much to think about.

Reckless, sure. Kai had been reckless before, even selfishly so. Ditch the team to sail into a camp full of skeletons, and it please ye! But back then, Kai had been desperate to save his sister. He'd also been much younger and hadn't yet accepted the value of being in a team.

But that car chase. That had been pure, pointless, senseless daredevilism. He hadn't been desperate to save a life; he had been bored. And for that, he had risked his own life and the fate of the entire mission—by extension, the fate of Ninjago. All because he wanted a thrill.

Back in the corner of his mind that wasn't actually supposed to have any say in the matter, Cole had wondered fleetingly if Kai was suicidal. And-or having a psychopathic episode.

But then, maybe it was just growing pains. Teenagers were supposed to have those, right? Maybe Kai was just trapped in that awkward stage between full adulthood and reckless boyhood, frustrated until he just had to push the limits of sanity. Or maybe the months of suits and spelling-books and unruly students at Sensei Wu's academy had left him a little stir-crazy, and he had just gone wild once he got back in action. Cole hoped and prayed that was it. Either way he reckoned that blossoming relationship between him and Skylor would bring him back down to earth.

But he still couldn't shake the lingering unease. Even now, there was something different about Kai. Something gritty in his tone, something edgy in his walk, something hard about the light in his eyes. Lloyd kept oddly tight-lipped about what Kai had been doing for a living before they gathered for Chen's tournament. And even as it shamed him to even think it, Cole couldn't help but wonder why—after Lloyd and Kai had gone out to get pinecones for the dragon mash—the Green Ninja had returned home limping and silent.

Speaking of, Lloyd himself. Well, if you were going to talk about changes, you could definitely start there. Cole thought back to the bratty little kid in a skeleton-painted hoodie, and to the slightly (slightly) less-bratty little kid tripping over the hems of a green ninja suit, and wondered how in the world this Lloyd was the same person. He was still the youngest, and as official baby of the family was usually first in line to get teased or ganged up on—but it also meant he was the one everyone was quickest to stand up for and protect. Cole ventured a small grin; it was readily debatable which side of that coin irked Lloyd more.

Still, he was "one of them" now, not just the youngster somebody was always stuck looking after. He'd even become the glue of the team, almost its leader in a lot of ways. He still had his little fits of immaturity now and then, but overall he was sharp-witted, responsible, and serious. Probably a little too serious, for someone his age.

And that had only gotten more noticeable after losing Garmadon. Lloyd had taken it well—almost unsettlingly calmly, really—but something seemed different. Not only had he lost that contagious smirk that twitched up one side of his face and dared you not to smile back; the signature mixture of snark and sly wit and serious had been toned back till only one of the three remained. And he'd actually started brushing his hair a little, taming the unruly mop he'd usually let it languish in . . . It was almost like he was trying to get rid of everything that related him to his father. If that was his way of moving on, it didn't strike Cole as the healthiest way to do it. But how to even bring something like that up? "Hey, bro, we need to talk about how you're handling cursing your own dad to an eternity in a hellish alternate dimension"?

Yeesh.

Somebody had to get through to the kid, had to break down that shell of cool maturity he was trying to build around himself. But heaven only knew how to do that. Cole wished heaven would stop being coy already and give him a clue.

And of course, Zane. It was ridiculous, but—after being destroyed and built into a completely new body, with only fragmented memories of his past self—Zane was the one who had changed the least. At core, he was still his sweet-natured, slightly bewildered self.

That wasn't to say he hadn't changed at all, of course. He looked different, functioned different, to some degree thought different. During the first few days of his return he would often zone out, glowing blue eyes going dim, and talk to PIXAL silently inside his head—but he seemed to do that less and less often lately, and Cole wondered why. He also seemed much less close with his falcon, all of a sudden.

And his memories. So, so many of them were missing. At first, every time he discovered another thing he was supposed to remember but didn't, there would be a flash of grief in his eyes that no amount of effort could conceal. With time, as it happened again and again, the grief faded away, to be replaced by a dull resignation that was just as painful for the others to watch. The one bright spark in the situation was, a lot of his memories seemed to be more buried than actually lost. A little prodding, a little hint or reminder, and suddenly a bolt of recognition would cross his face and he'd remember. That was good.

Who was he kidding; it was just good to have their friend back. They could help him retrieve or rebuild his memories, or just make new ones. Just so long as he was here.

Well, that's all well and good, piped the resident voice in Cole's head. A nice batch of psychoanalysis. But what about you, wise guy?

He flinched. Not very fair, sitting here assessing the others as if he didn't have any flaws of his own. He'd changed too, after all. But he didn't want to think about it . . .

Oh, no, insisted the voice sternly. Now you. Siddown and take a look at yourself. Team leader needs to hold himself to high standards, eh?

Cole gulped. This was going to be painful.

But to be honest with himself, then. He hadn't been doing the best of jobs with those "high standards," had he? The lumberjack job had made him small-minded, preoccupied with the nitty-gritty petty bits of life. Nobody expected honor from a musclebound axe-whacker, just sweat and so-and-so many cords of wood a day. Meet your quota, go home, sprawl in front of the TV with junk food. Repeat daily. It was an okay life for some people, but . . . he'd been brought up otherwise. He'd been trained to exercise self-control, to have discipline and self-respect. How had he thrown all of that away so easily?

He'd really let himself go . . . A wave of shame overtook him as he thought back to the Tournament. He'd gotten in the way more than he'd helped, slacked off instead of pushing them all to do better, made stick-in-the-mud protests instead of encouraging the others to think big and have hope. And his fight with Jay—he couldn't even blame the lumberjack job for the sheer immaturity and selfishness he'd shown there.

Sure, the team didn't need a leader anymore. They probably wouldn't tolerate a leader anymore. But that was no excuse—he'd let them all down. Again and again.

Sighing, Cole laid his forehead on his folded arms for a moment, then rested his cheek on one forearm and sighted along the tabletop listlessly. He caught sight of his reflection in the silvery coffeepot, frowned, and jabbed it between the eyes.

"You suck," he informed it. Then, after a moment, "And you're going to do something about that."

Briefly he wondered how he would explain himself if someone came in and caught him berating the coffeepot, but he shrugged that away. He'd just grin and tell them he'd gone cuckoo. Much easier to explain.