(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 52 minutes)

Study the Cock

“They call it the Dreamtime, far more south than I’ve ever coasted,” the Wayfarer said, guiding Vesperos through the quietest alleys of a worker’s district. It was just the pair of them, and a little distance from the boisterous toads was something of a relief. Not that the bee didn’t like them, or feared their insectivorous nature, it was just that his cell back in the hive had been such a perfect sort of peace, not silent, alive with the hum of all the other bees and wasps, but free of conflict. It had been the sound of harmony, of vibrating on the same wavelength as the planet. A symptom perhaps, to enjoy such a thing this far into his divine degradation, but no matter. It was closer to Psyche.

“Dreamtime,” he repeated, only to keep the Wayfarer talking. The sanded grain of the rat’s affable voice was almost as good as the hum, and he hardly seemed aware he was a font of incredibly varied knowledge. ‘Coasting’ as he described it had taken him from Constantinople to near the summit of the world, but never far inland.

His father had come from Norway, in a king’s fleet, received as such in each country visited. The traveler met a beautiful rat lady of Constantinople and had himself a Turkish delight box full of ratlings. Among them was the Wayfarer, born in his mother’s country but on his father’s ship and amongst the sweat, creak, and stomp of its customs. Thus he knew no borders, and at the same time appeared to be more of a beggar searching for the end of the road than a swashbuckling adventurer.

Stranger yet was the frog Tiddalik, who had produced a pond from his mouth in furtherance of their escape, a technique the Wayfarer was now explaining. Vesperos was not familiar with the Dreamtime, but from the language used it was clear a pantheon of the southern hemisphere was involved.

“Tiddalik calls himself a changed frog, and I’m too polite to point out that his private reservoir countermands such an assertion,” the rat said, offering the bee a hand so they could take a few steps up. Workers moved about around them in overalls and oily shirtlessness. They’d entered the dry dock proper, where the rat had been earning his wage. “Holding water is what got him kicked abroad in the first place.”

“Is he a demigod of some kind?”

“No, but he and many other animals down that way were directly created by a god or two, rather than born. He’s far from the only one with a faded coat of magic on him. Since he likely doesn’t want to tell it again, I don’t mind repeating it. Others of his sort ganged up on him once during a drought. Whole lake had gone missing.

Tiddalik wasn’t shy about having swallowed it. You know how frogs are, when they’re scared they’re going to run dry; sometimes they act unreasonable. He wouldn’t give it up, until some eel came along and danced on the dry ground in a fashion so profoundly tickling, humorous I mean, that our guzzler had to give it up to laugh. I think he coasted up to this side of the world for a fresh start, and the security of water wrung from Hestia’s apron.”

Vesperos had more questions, but they couldn’t scrabble up the hull of the ship they just about ran into, nor could they be heard over the testing of its foghorn, which shook the wooden slats holding the metal monster in place. If it had been built on the human scale all woods would have cracked under it. Here was the largest candle boat ever constructed, and its quintuple-wound, self-straightening, smoke-dying, industrial wick was just being lowered into the hollowed wax shaft that would be its home.

Wordlessly the Wayfarer scaled the portholes, climbed the crane lowering the wick and its caging frame, and rode it down into place, seemingly just for the pleasure of it. All the workmen gave a hurrah, tossed their hats, several of which were caught by the noble rat and thrown back to their owners.

“There she is: the SMS Wicky Sticket,” he said upon returning to the bee’s side, smile all buck teeth. “She would be too big to slide into the water like a man’s ship, but since her escort is just going to pick her up and carry her to water that’s no concern of ours. What do you think?”

“A gorgeous vessel, to be sure.” Vesperos looked past her deck, to where a masted ship was contained inside a massive glass bottle. The purposes of all these strange craft were a matter for another time. “And the cartons are?”

“Ah yes, this way,” the rat said, drawing him around back of the ship where the hull was open and a gangway extended. He kept talking, warm nothings and informative somethings, but just then Vesperos’s twitching antennae were more concerned with the other voices heard in the background, not those of the workers, but of the members of the Challenge Obscene.

Diminished as he was, Vesperos was still the god of love, and retained power in its many facets, one of those, the most vital the bee himself would say, being communication. Having formed a bond with his fellow challengers, he could use his antennae to, in a sense, hear their words and predicaments, as well as speak to them remotely.

For now this was the entirety of the coordination between the three teams, set to their separate tasks in the hope of finding a crack in the cockatrice’s armor as well as rescuing the reputation of Mrs. Toad. Tabitha and Buffy had been dispatched to put a combination codpiece and muzzle on the so-called Mr. Toad, while Tiddalik had gone to Loftplace, to the Castle of the Grip, to check on Mrs. Toad’s accommodations and ensure her physical safety.

By the estimate of his antennae, Vesperos knew the biker toads were about to assert themselves on the Hotel Trogolo, where they’d tracked their fellow daft and deviant amphibian. Tiddalik was still trying to figure out the best way to infiltrate a sand castle. Yes, he could just push his way through, he muttered to himself and thus to Vesperos as well without realizing, but then that would leave a terribly obvious hole.

“Here we are, the cartons,” the Wayfarer said, “oh and lucky us, they’re nearly full.” The bumbling god had nearly forgotten his own task, and might have wandered off if not for the enticing rope-wave swish of the Wayfarer’s tail guiding him down into the bowels of the Sticky Wicket, where a particular dozen or so of its workers were temporarily bunking in the final stages of its assembly.

Eggties all they were, and yet none familiar. While an eggty was an uncommon aberration of nature, affecting only one egg in tens of thousands, there were still tiers to this rarity that needed considering, especially in Minimil where such creatures intentionally congregated. Under the umbrella of civilization, of advancing husbandry technology, it was chickens and other fowl that laid the most eggs and which were most likely to have early diagnostic anomalies discovered in time.

So the eggs of chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, and quail were the most plentiful among the eggties, and thus built their cultures around themselves, incidentally leaving others out in the cold, a terrible thing to do to an animal that already lacked the warmth to hatch. Reptile eggs, fish eggs, and even the eggs of the furry platypus could suffer the intellect and stunted development of the eggty as well.

And when the furniture and clothing weren’t made for their unique shapes and sizes, they had to turn elsewhere. In this case the Wayfarer had befriended an assorted bunch of them who were brought on by Hestia to work on the candle ship’s hull integrity, experts as they were in ensuring their own shells never ruptured or leaked. As a joke, they’d all taken to calling their temporary lodging there the cartons. It was most convenient for the challengers, who now had many questions about another eggty who hadn’t fit in with the common yolk.

Shockingly kind and welcoming, the carton of oddballs practically sucked the Wayfarer and Vesperos off the stairs and into chairs. They’d never felt so embraced, without even applying a handicap for their hosts’ complete lack of limbs. The bee did his best to identify their natures before they became too deep in the conversation to politely ask, only succeeding with a few of them: a mermaid’s purse who could see and be seen through her translucent pouch, a flexible leathery caiman egg, and a taut net holding together a mass of tiny hummingbird eggs, all of them intelligent and apparently operating as one entity.

“We’d love to spread the word about what we go through in this town,” the dogfish egg case said, introducing herself as Megzy Bregzy. “People think we’re all off working in that big bank, as if none of us know how to lift a hammer.” She received a bolstering round of ‘bully’ from the bunks and decided to demonstrate by folding herself in a gripping fashion around the nearest tool, which was in fact a hammer. It clattered to the floor a moment later, but technically she had picked it up, and no one had chosen to say anything more. Nor was it picked up off the floor until after their visitors had left.

“It was our hope that you might have some information regarding Zamshy Lamshy,” Vesperos asked directly, chitinous elbows tapping on his knees as he leaned forward. A hush fell over them; many of the hummingbird eggties rotated inward in a huddle to confer with each other.

“He’s just another chicken,” the caiman egg, who had quietly introduced himself as Godky Lodky, growled.

“He was just another chicken,” the Wayfarer corrected, “now he’s a cockatrice. You all are lucky you can’t see him. We’ve been an inch from his petrifying gaze; it makes you sweat your parasites as pebbles.”

“Though he was a chicken egg,” the bee said to narrow the question, “we wondered if he had been around any of you. We’ve heard from… a party involved in his hatching that he showed up alone, in the dark of night and rain, wearing a running design but no face. Does this sound familiar? Do you know from where such an egg might have emerged?”

“From an arse,” Godky grumbled, shifting in his shell so he could coil up and bite his own tail.

“A design you say?” one of the more typical eggties muttered. “That’s what he said!” The other voice came from the same shell, so Vesperos assumed them to be a twin yolk situation. The second one spoke up again, perhaps while the first was doing the thinking. “A design instead of a face usually means they’ve come out of a coop, also called nesting grounds and hatcheries.”

“Do not most eggs come out of a coop?”

“These coops are mostly businesses run by the big,” Megzy Bregzy explained. The slippery tip of her tail assumed several configurations, supplying helpful pictograms. “If an animal lays an eggty that usually means it has a much higher chance of laying more eggties later on, and we’re considered very useful in this age of Little Wars, more as liaisons than soldiers, but valuable enough that humans try and pump out as many of us as they can now.

Anyway, most of the coops stamp their eggs with an emblem or logo, branding their property. If Zamshy came from one of them he was probably a runny egg: an escaped slave technically.”

“Not that that gives him reason to imprison the rest of us in our own city,” the hummingbirds added in chorus.

“Now that you mention it, I’ve seen some of these logos before,” the Wayfarer said, leaning his chin on his walking stick. “On eggties across the continent. I distinctly remember a black one: two wings on a human skull. Our involved party mentioned that the color on Zamshy’s shell was black. Could they be one and the same coop?”

“The winged skull is the symbol of the Nevermorals coop,” one of the twin yolks said. “They’re an unkindness of ravens descended from a line that drove an aristocrat out of his home with the madness of a single repeated word, over and over, from every direction and at all times: Nevermore. They run themselves, conspiring from their stolen mansion, selling their services as spies and lie detectors in Little Wars. They keep a tight grip on their own; there is no way they’d let one roll about here unsupervised and destitute.”

“I know another coop that uses black on their stamp,” Godky said. “Ukridge Farms, in Britain. They’re close. I think they established with… three layers if memory serves. They’re a typical coop, every egg tested and all those that come off as ordinary sold to the grocers. Zamshy could’ve slipped out of a place like that.”

“Are they cruel to their charges?” the bee asked. “Accounting for the slavery of course.”

“If you’re asking if that’s why our early bird cum wyrm has a chip on his shoulder, I couldn’t say,” the leathery eggty answered. “Couldn’t guess what he’ll make the city do about it either.” The challengers probed further, but that was the extent of both their knowledge and educated guesses. The mood was becoming hard-boiled, so the pair gave their copious thanks and departed.

“I would call that a success,” the rat said, twirling as he walked to take a parting look at the Wicky Sticket, making it unclear if he spoke on his labor there or the interview just finished.

“That could be useful information,” Vesperos tentatively agreed, “but it’s not the crucial information. I’ve been thinking about Zamshy and his actions thus far. He’s no simple tyrant; one of those would have made a greater example of Hestia loyalists. I would’ve been targeted and stoned to death specifically. He’s making at least a token effort to simulate a seamless transition of power. He’s not rocking the boat.”

“Nobody will rock that boat,” the rat commented idly, stealing another look.

“And from his affection with Mrs. Toad, instinctive though it may be, we know this devil is not without love reddening his black heart. What is it that he truly loves, soul and mind? That is what he commits this endeavor too, and that is what we must learn.”

“We’d better share what we know with the others,” the Wayfarer suggested, to which the bumblebee agreed. He stopped in place, limbered up his antennae with gestures that might have appeared lewd if performed just three seconds longer, and then honed in on the presence of the lady toads, from Minimil, to the neighborhood Swallowdown, to the Hotel Trogolo…

…

“There’s a bug in my ear,” Tabitha complained, digging around in the pathetic depression toads had to refer to as their ears. “Oh wait… Naw, it’s just Cupid doing that thing again.”

“I’ve got it too,” Buffy said, opening and closing her mouth as if trying to adjust the air pressure in her head. “What’s he saying? Zamshy might’ve come from Ukridge Farms? What good does that do us?”

“None, so let’s get the real goods out of this ‘ideous ‘otel and lock ‘im up for ‘is own good, just like that Mr. Badger done to ‘im that one time.”

“I don’t think that worked.”

“Then it’ll just be for our satisfaction. Look tough now love.” Buffy obeyed by inflating her cheeks, more than taut enough to take a few punches and send them right back where they came. Swagger firmly swallowed, both amphibians marched up to the Hotel Trogolo, paying no attention at all to the fancy shades of the folded purple paper making up its overlapping roofs or the can opener statue, bearing a polished can lid mirror, standing just beside them.

Their reflections didn’t watch them from it, but someone else did, clad in blue and magic. Vanishing a moment later, this mysterious third had, despite being outdoors, been much more appropriately dressed than the two motorbike enthusiasts who pushed their way inside with nothing but their throats.

Emptier than usual thanks to the turmoil of Zamshy’s rise, there were still a fair amount of snooty folk about, looking to get away from home for a spell, even if ‘away’ referred only to two or three horse stalls. Many of them snickered at the common toads, whose very clothing could have been called uncouth, as were the obvious weapons hanging out of their pants pockets.

Accustomed to such treatment, knowing full well Mrs. Toad, in her naivete, was the only wealthy warty worth a wet one, Tabitha and Buffy marched to the concierge and demanded to know the number of the room housing the philandering Mr. Toad. Behind the desk was a cricket husk, hollow as the toads’ patience, animated by the eerie blue of a tempestuous enchanting force, the meddling of a scheming fairy.

The cricket did not answer them or acknowledge their presence. Tabitha pulled out her chain and twirled it, working it up to thumping speed, but something else thumped first. It came from the floor above them. Then it came again. The third thump was much more fatigued, and was followed by an obnoxious giggle, which would have been recognizable to the Death-or-Glory toads through several floors.

“That’s ‘im,” Tabitha snarled, forgetting the cricket and heading straight for the stairs, reserved for guests and guests of guests only. “Let’s murder ‘im first, then we’ll tell ‘im ‘e needs to act ‘is station.”

“Might we fit a skinning in there somewhere?” Buffy added.

“Always time for the little things love.” Together they took the steps six at a time, as toads tend. His head hadn’t turned one degree, but through the cricket’s empty eyes they’d been watched, just as through the mirror, and the observer chose to make herself known before they could reach their destination, which was room 174.

“Good evening ladies,” a voice so feminine as to be ethereal greeted them. Terribly startled, the toads jumped onto the hallway wall and off it again, but managed to continue walking. As they did they gathered in their frequent side-eyeing the immaculate image of the fairy with the turquoise hair, owner of the Hotel Trogolo, and the Bonsai Box Inn, and the Egg Cup Brunchery, and the…

Her portfolio was still not as impressive as her looks, which had turned men to wood rather than stone, or her magics, which had turned wood into men. Lighter-than-sapphire hair tumbled down one shoulder into diminishing whirlpools, ghostly firefly eyes put will in her wisp, and rolled lunar moth wings sat on her back like rugs, except they appeared to add no weight at all to her otherwise dainty frame.

Crisply dressed in a suit of darker blue, lapels almost bursting with periwinkle flower petals trying to escape the living weave of her undershirt, the fairy looked ready to attend a meeting of shareholders, and that was exactly what she considered her current stroll down the hall, as the toads looked chaotic, and those of the fae realm had no better partners in history than the mad and shortsighted.

“Watch where you’re being gorgeous,” Buffy praise-threatened.

“This is my hotel,” the proprietor said, so nonplussed she sounded as if she expected Buffy to read her the minutes from their last meeting.

“Well there’s a toad stuck in it by ‘is-“

“And that toad’s coming with us,” Buffy resolved. “He’s got a missus to get back to. He can’t be here thumping all the livelong day.”

“That would be Mr. Toad you’re referring to,” the fairy said, “and that’s fine. At first his antics were amusing, possibly useful for blackmail, but he has gotten so boisterous in this affair, and that affair, and that other affair over there, that anybody might blackmail him, so now he’s only worth what he’s paying for the room.

See him out for me, but do not damage one wall or piece of furniture in this place. If you do you’ll have to answer to me.”

“Small fry ‘e is,” Tabitha cackled. “What ‘arm could ‘e do your lamps?”

“He’s got a sword he’s been bandying about,” the fairy mentioned, which gave Buffy, but not Tabitha, slight pause. They caught up to the lead toad, who had easily caught up to the stationary room 147.

“Didn’t Mrs. Toad say fencing was one of his obsessions?” Buffy asked.

“What of it?” Tabitha scoffed as she cracked her knuckles in preparation for a very stern knock, one meant to overpower the stern knocks the bedposts were suffering just on the other side. Mr. Toad’s voice, and three others, escaped around the door frame in hooting ecstasy.

“Don’t ya suppose he might be good at it Tabs?”

“And there will be more tabs to be concerned with if he pokes a hole in my wallpaper,” the fairy with the turquoise hair reminded.

“Right, when ‘e opens it just look for ‘is sword and grab it with your tongue then,” Tabitha suggested, not proceeding with her knock until after Buffy nodded and did just as many tongue warm-up exercises as the knock had required. Tonk tonk tonk!

“Ah, new arrivals,” Mr. Toad called out from within. “Did I order you? I can hardly remember, but I can answer a door! As soon as! Ouch, watch out you. I find it! Haho!” The door flew open, and Mr. Toad’s brazenness was revealed. His pants couldn’t be on his legs, for they were stuck to the ceiling with slippy-sloppy slime.

What he had instead covered were his eyes, obscured behind a blue blindfold, a hand towel courtesy of the Hotel Trogolo. An open nightshirt flapped across his chest, boldly striped, all the buttons missing, some stuck where they’d landed from sheer force rather than slime, one from both, which was positioned in the center of his blindfold like a medium’s third eye revealed. He was smaller than both his fellow toads, but the size of his personality, and one particular lancing concentration of it, convinced them to take a step back.

“Bloomey, where are ‘is blimers!?” Tabs sputtered, shielding her eyes as well, while the fairy tilted to make sure she understood every angle of the situation, seeing through Mr. Toad’s legs to his three giggling bed mates in the soaked sheets.

“Oh I’m well past such pleasantries,” Mr. Toad boasted, but then his smile dimmed. It seemed he sensed these visitors were not as enthusiastic or friendly as the others. “Say now, do I know you?”

“Not that ya would remember us,” Buffy spat, but not literally, not with the fairy watching like a hawk. “Your missus sent us. She wants ya to come home, lord knows why. We’re here to take ya back.”

“Ooh in a motorcar?” Mr. Toad asked.

“On our bikes.”

“Fiddlesticks. No room for the accouterments on a bike. I need a big loud horn! One that goes poop-poop!”

“Poop-poop!” his bedfellows exclaimed form just out of sight.

“Just get your knickers on you twit,” Tabitha urged, squeezing her chain, its subtle clinks softening Mr. Toad’s energy slightly.

“I’m not going anywhere!” he declared. One pant leg peeled off the ceiling and hung striped behind him as waving banner. “I explained to Mrs. Toad already, poor girl, always needing a tutor in the wifely ways, that this has bugger all to do with her. I’m not in love with any of these… whatever I have in here with me presently.” If actually documented, those presently enjoying his company were a tree frog of questionably toxic skin color, a homunculus of someone’s no-shoes-indoors bugbear, and an enchanted middle finger puppet eager to be flipped.

“Take that stupid thing off your face,” Tabitha ordered, “you’re done playing your little games.” Mr. Toad ran has webbed paws across his eyes as if to remove it before throwing his arms up defiantly.

“Haha! Games? This is part of no game, I assure you sir, or surly madame, whatever you are. I’ll have you know that some of the people who have entered this room are terrible gossips who have nonetheless kept me well-informed of the goings-on out there.

I know there’s a cockatrice running the show now. One look at them and I’d be a garden decoration! Perhaps an ordinary fellow could handle quiet contemplation of that sort, a country toad whose as likely to be a pumpkin as pick one, but not this city toad. I cannot stand to sit still; it’s torture. No one’s going to come along and put new toys in my frozen hands, or drop me onto the pedals of a motorcar.

No I need to keep my wits about me, and I refuse to remove this blindfold, or leave this room, until Minimil gets itself together!”

“We’re trying to get ya and Mrs. Toad together,” Buffy reminded, wisely deciding not to mention it was his wife that had hatched the cockatrice conspiracy. His reactions were chaotic, but she knew whichever one he selected would not be beneficial in the moment.

“We’re not giving you a choice,” Tabitha ribbited, hopping over the threshold. With her chain in hand she didn’t care whether she wrapped it around his head or a limb, as anything could be used to drag him out. Her quarry was very aware of the all the clinking it produced, thus avoiding her first swing with a backward leap, which brought him close enough to grab the naked rapier leaned up against the bed.

The space was too narrow for Buffy and the fairy to join, so the duel of the two toads was a back and forth, Mr. Toad gaining his blind bearings all the while. Buffy was the larger, and she’d sent many opponents down and out, but those were matters of the alley, robbery, shakedown, and intimidation. A formal duel was uncomfortable for her.

It seemed to be Mr. Toad’s element, even without his eyes. The even portion of the fight was just exploratory, him learning how to deflect and avoid such a tawdry pedestrian weapon as the chain. Only once did Buffy get it wrapped around the sword and enter them into a battling tug.

“Oh that’s tight!” he declared jovially. “Are you sure you don’t belong in here with the others?”

“That’s disgusting!”

“More like repulsive,” Toad countered, “now consider yourself repulsed!” A forward lunge was coupled with an expert swish, pushing Tabitha back into the hallway and robbing her of her chain, which was flicked somewhere up into the bed’s canopy to join many articles of clothing dangling unidentifiably.

Worse than that, Mr. Toad was now having fun, a state from which little could dissuade him in Heaven, Earth, or Wonderland. He pressed the attack outside 147. Now unarmed, Tabitha was defended from a bafflingly precise thrust by Buffy’s cudgel, made from a chunk of wood and the head of a nail, made from a little less wood once Mr. Toad’s strike gouged a chip out of it.

The shorter of the bikers tried to roll behind him, perhaps get her arms under his, but Mr. Toad sensed it, throwing out a kick that knocked out Tabitha’s air and flattened her against the wall. As a result a portrait hanging above her fell; she scrambled to catch it before a cautionary word could escape the fairy withe the turquoise hair.

One of the proprietor’s eyebrows raised along with the portrait as it was hastily returned to its hook, but she said nothing. It wasn’t clear if Mr. Toad, practically clairvoyant in his unrestrained hobbyhorsing around, had perceived her presence at all. Without unfurling her rolled wings, merely flexing air through their swirls, she levitated around the battle effortlessly, checking for property damage from every angle, arms already crossed should she need to initiate a stern talking-to.

The misplaced master of Toad Hall went instead for a poking-through, resulting in Buffy hopping back the way they’d come, constantly switching the location from which she gripped the cudgel as her opponent’s blade smacked the previous one. This kept her attention on her own weapon, but Tabitha, who now approached the tinier toad from behind, was not similarly protected from distraction.

She attempted to pounce; Mr. Toad spun around and thrust, not with his rapier, which was merely at the ready, but with the party favor that had entertained his guests well into the next day. Tabitha, not one for the boastful jousting of men at any point, and embarrassed secondhand for her friend Mrs. Toad, recoiled in disgust and threw a forearm over her own eyes.

Thus her pounce missed, struck a stand off to the side and sent the vase atop it wobbling. The sound terrified her. Quick as she could she righted it, looking up to see the fairy with the turquoise hair peeking just over it, nodding approvingly, but still threateningly as well. Past them Mr. Toad was forcing Buffy back to the stairs, she too partly self-blinded by his reckless trouserlessness. So much so that she preferred to tumble backward down them, painfully, than remain at eye level with either his third eye or third leg.

“Buffy!” Tabitha called after her.

“Quiet in the halls please,” the fairy request-dictated as she glided along behind. Leaping down the stairs as an amphibian whose legs are best served bent squat against the ground was always difficult; Tabitha had to instead walk down them dreadfully slow. Buffy’s much jauntier tumble left her alone in the lobby with the idiot who had turned the tables just by bumping into them. He pressed his attack, in a slightly wrong direction, toward a wall.

The wall would surely be bested, and the ire of the fairy drawn, if Buffy did not intervene. Sighing in dread, she leapt into the path of his assault and stuck out her palm so that the tip of the rapier would strike it instead. Briefly she was pinned to the wall, suppressing the pain and its associated yelp, saved from more significant injury by the many tailpipe burns callused over on her paw from the ten or so times she’d made her motorbike ‘good as new’.

Mr. Toad nearly got her again, with his burning tailpipe, when Tabitha finally reached the bottom step and decided to give the leaping pounce another go. Arguably it went worse the second time, with Mr. Toad ducking under her bulk, touching her underbelly, and throwing her further, right into Buffy. The both of them went rolling as one mass out the front doors, which the cricket husk opened at the moment that would most spare the Hotel Trogolo any damage.

The bikers broke apart when they collided with the can opener installation that held the welcoming mirror aloft, and they were left staring, dazed, at multiple circling copies of Mr. Toad as they re-centered and became one.

“It smells like street,” the victorious amphibian commented upon taking a whiff of the air at the door’s threshold. “That means we are finished here, for I am not finished… up there! Haho!” He pointed to the upper floors. “Good day gentlemen, I hope, for you presence was far from ladylike. Hoho, good show Mr. Toad.” Awash in smug success, he disappeared back into the hotel, to be momentarily replaced by the fairy with the turquoise hair.

“Take a lesson from Zamshy Lamshy,” she advised them, “if you want to make an omelet you’ve got to break an egg, not a toad, and certainly not my property.” The door closed, and the wet-bottom alley toads saw the sapphire blur behind the foggy glass dissolve into mist.

“What was all that!?” Tabitha croaked as she got to her feet and realized she would need to limp to her motorbike.

“If we’re talking odds, he should be skilled in at least one of his hobbies,” Buffy excused. “It can’t all be auto crashes and overturned boats. Fencing must be his calling. Besides, he was tough to look at and we had that fairy breathing down our backs. He’s dug in like a tick in a turtle.”

“I ‘ear you,” she grumbled as she used matchstick dust and flint to light the candle under her steam engine. It chugged to life and calmed her. “Shouldn’t try that again. That giant cock’ll blind us less than ‘er ‘usband’s underlillies.”

“Should we tell the other challengers?”

“I don’t feel much like a challenger love; you go ahead and think at the bee for the both of us. You’re the thinking one.”

…

Despite being the thinking one, and being diligent and measured in those most orderly thoughts sent to Vesperso via imagined sealed envelope and post rider, an occupation temporarily filled by her imaginary friend from her tadpole years, Buffy’s thoughts had far-reaching consequences for the residents of the much, and yet again, transformed neighborhood of Loftplace.

Tiddalik had not shared with his fellow challengers the degree to which his drinking problem went unmanaged. Since his banishment from his native Australia he no longer consumed entire lakes or rivers so as not to deny less thirsty creatures what they needed to survive, but he could never be convinced that barrels, buckets, and puddles were important, even when connected by pipe, drain, and gutter to various delicate urban systems.

He drank absentmindedly, and when flustered or fretted, a state he found himself in when, by way of Vesperos antennae transmission, he learned of the Death-or-Glory toads’ mismanhandling of Mrs. Toad’s man. It also confused him, as they were so proud of that title yet had found neither death nor glory. The colorful frog was sure he could’ve done better at that task himself, and by using the water everyone kept telling him he shouldn’t hold onto.

So what if that fairy was concerned about her hotel staying in one piece? Tiddalik knew what could solve that problem expeditiously: a lot of water. The Hotel Trogolo was built out of an old trough, so if he were to flood it Mr. Toad would be washed out regardless of objection and the building would remain intact.

His desert-baked brain lacked the subtlety to understand any upset over ‘interior design’ or ‘water-damaged antiques’, instead spending its time on the way to Loftplace, where stood the Castle of the Grip, which now held Mrs. Toad under the gorgon’s eye of Zamshy, fretting over how their assignments should have been swapped. Now when he found Mrs. Toad his rescue of her would be spoiled by having to tell her she wasn’t returning to the arms of Mr. Toad, just whatever hole they were going to put her in until they could address the elephant cock in the room.

And without realizing he was doing it, Tiddalik gulped down every drop of water he crossed once he reached the old hayloft, including several public fountains and the reservoirs that fed them. In turn, much of the inner neighborhood was quietly dehydrated and destabilized.

The newcomer was even less informed than most about Loftplace’s busy process of metamorphosis over the last decade. First the parliament, the very Shoulders of Government, had been overthrown in a great pyre that transformed into the hearth-throne of Hestia, which soon had to be accommodated with massive construction projects like the fire pit underneath it and the chimney overhead.

The throne still stood, and even still smoldered, a strong indicator that Zamshy’s petrification had not outright killed the Greek goddess. The cockatrice had chosen not to interfere with what was not a problem, focusing instead on the upcoming concert. Through no effort of his, everything surrounding the throne now struggled with endless change, mostly at the raking hands of one man: Gumbonero Ludmenti.

He was the Blefuscan lord of seven sand castles, but those were back on his home islands. One of his first acts as the prime underling of the goddess was to have all the trunks, hatboxes, and instrument cases that had been the old buildings of Loftplace literally shoved to the margins to make way for his preferred method of construction.

Now the ring surrounding the hearth-throne was a skyline of glittering towers, roofs made from the sands with the highest quartz content. Everything from the high-end shopping district, to the ornamental gardens, to Hestia’s latest war room under the floorboards, was now principally constructed from the various sands of the world and subject to constant flux.

Many lived in apartments that had been forcibly converted, been made to sign contracts making clear that Lord Ludmenti could alter their layout or the types of sand used on a whim as a part of his endless research into the material, including a clause in bold print that any sane person would’ve made fine, that he could also do this in the middle of the night, with a shovel, and in person if he so chose.

Many of these homes and facilities were partly maintained by sprayers, like watering can spouts on canisters, fed by hoses, which were themselves fed by the reservoirs Tiddalik had nervously drained. Now anyone looking to fortify their back wall with their morning chore of misting it to the optimal saturation was left to either complain or wait and wonder when it would come tumbling down.

Indeed they were already collapsing, in public no less, by the time the oblivious cause reached the outer grounds of the Castle of the Grip: the tallest and most magnificent sand building in Minimil. Mrs. Toad was somewhere inside; all he had to do was extract her. It should’ve been easier than plucking a peach pit, what with all these garden walls and shop windows collapsing when looked at funny.

“There’s sand all over the display!” a shopkeeper elf moaned, trudging through her hard work, trying to shake grit out of a blouse while her radish-mandrake assistant kept shaking the malfunctioning sprayer. “If this is the good lord’s doing I swear I’ll be the squeakiest wheel on a locomotive punching straight through his-“

“Deep breaths Meringue,” the radish advised, rich coming from a being with no lungs. “Remember the world’s smallest violin. Soon that’s all we’ll be hearing, no squeaking anywhere near an ear.” Their gibbering drew the attention of many passersby, several of whom considered themselves experts at rebuilding or fixing Ludmenti’s work; their unhelpful helping was the perfect distraction for Tiddalik, who leapt over a wire fence and crept to the base of the castle before crawling around its exterior with his belly low.

Zamshy had fawned over Mrs. Toad and would surely set her up in the castle’s finest room, which would undoubtedly be one of the highest with the best view. From there the frog guessed it would face either the whole of the city or the nearby window, as the back of the loft and the nearly-extinguished throne were not the best sights on offer.

From there all he had to do was aim his mouth at the ground, expel a propelling jet of water, thus demonstrating his need for the meager rations, and peek in all of the highest windows for any sign of her. They hadn’t given him the best assignment, but by the rainbow serpent he was going to get it done.

The Castle of the Grip was the most reliable structure in the sandy district, its shape rarely changing, most of its modifications occurring on the interior. Its principle element was a black volcanic sand, lustrous and imposing, rising high into the loft and terminating its towers with sculptures of human hands gripping very real conch shells bearing the most ostentatious patterns of nature outside the stomach of the very rainbow serpent Tiddalik had just paid his respects to.

Its breathtaking construction made it difficult to spot even such a pastel anomaly as Tiddalik jumping about around its walls, so he successfully went unnoticed for all eight windows he checked, ceasing only because he had succeeded. After catching a glimpse of Mrs. Toad sat on the edge of a luxurious bed, Tiddalik silently grasped the windowsill and hung under it, listening in to her conversation with the man standing just out of sight.

“-And should you need anything else you can ask myself or any of my guards. We’ll be having dinner in the banquet hall at eight: lumpfish roe confit with nested white asparagus strands and poppy seed pie for dessert.”

“Thank you Lord Ludmenti,” Mrs. Toad said shyly, Tiddalik recognizing the name just beyond and below. Here was his dear friend, left under the care of a man who couldn’t keep his house in order enough to stop it from falling down one wall at a time. As if to prove his point, the ledge he grabbed started to deform under his paw. Another leap would be another risk of getting spotted, so he silently scolded the Blefuscan to get him to leave. That too worked. The frog should’ve made himself into a challenger much sooner.

Truthfully the man was called away by one of his guards in the hall, relaying to him the sudden instability of the town center, to an immediate conflict of the lord’s disbelief and consternation that added a few spirals to his already twisted mustache. As soon as it sounded like he was a good distance away, difficult to discern with footsteps on compacted sand, and more difficult with pathetic formless frog ears, Tiddalik scrambled up the slumping windowsill and tossed himself inside the suite.

Looking about, and having received a mental echo of the room Mr. Toad had been gallivanting in, the frog couldn’t help but wonder if their Challenge Obscene was just a subconscious excuse to stay in some very stately hotels. Sea shells were half-embedded in the ceiling as pink spiral stalactites. The bed curtains were Chinese silk, signed by the worm. It smelled like vanilla rum, actually the scent of a Blefuscan micro-flower transformed into incense and subtly burned inside those very same stalactites overhead, which only occasionally sprayed little jets of smoke from their tips.

“Tiddalik!” Mrs. Toad gasped as the intruder stood and turned to face her. “What are you doing here?”

“The bee botched the plan and sent me to get you back, but as long as I’m here I might as well.”

“But that’s so dangerous! I’m alright, really. I can keep a stiff upper lip for now. I don’t think Zamshy’s going to harm me. Besides, I deserve a little imprisonment.” To avert the tears escaping her eyes she spun around and buried her face in a comforter so thick she risked asphyxiation.

“I believe in you,” Tiddalik insisted. That was how they’d come together in this strange and slightly mildewed city. Neither had been invited to many parties, as Mrs. Toad wasn’t adapting well so far from the countryside, with its simple English fare like cold tongue and macaroni pudding, the former supposedly being a food and not the condition of the mouth before eating something. For Tiddalik the issue was as it always was, one of resources. He looked like he would drink the punch bowl in one go, and he would.

Both of them knew the other was perfectly good company, no matter what the social elite thought. So in the early days of Mr. Toad stepping out on his iterated doorstep and on his wife, kind Mr. Tiddalik would take his place, even bringing along a mop to clean up after himself should he spill his most recent drink. They were a social club of two, and that was how Tiddalik wanted to leave this particular estate as well.

“If I don’t bring you back that means all us frogs and toads got nothing done while the bee and the rat succeeded,” Tiddalik pointed out, tapping his head as if she could rifle through it like a filing cabinet and examine the evidence. “I think it would be better for our reputation if you came back with me.”

“I see… but don’t we want Zamshy to think all is well? He’ll know something is afoot if I go missing. Really, I can do this! I can do something. Everyone in Minimil can get something done; that’s the purpose of this place. I know that now.”

“Speaking of afoot,” Tiddalik whispered rather than arguing further. He didn’t share that he thought he’d heard something, instead hurrying to the door, which was merely a curtain, given how poorly hinges took to sand. He only wished to peek outside and check if anyone approached, but his snout bumped right into someone’s chest in the process.

Those damn toad ears were practically as useless as the bumblebee’s eyelids. Gumbonero’s had proven far sharper; he had doubled back to investigate whispering. The Blefuscan man grabbed the frog before he could respond, tossing him out into the hallway, where a simple well-aimed spurt could no longer get him back out the window.

“Trespasser!” the lord of the castle declared in his warbling accent, drawing a saber from its sheath and brandishing it at Tiddalik’s delicate throat. Was there some sort of conspiracy to end all amphibians by the sword after they’d lowered their defenses in the clutch of hospitality!? The frog thought so, but he had an ace in the hole he was about to make: some water.

“Do you know why I wouldn’t make a castle out of sand?” he asked, successfully quelling the lord’s barking. His beady eyes, all of them beady compared to a frog, narrowed.

“Do tell.”

“Because-” The next word out of his unhinging mouth was a violent surge of what the lord would call his property. It immediately soaked the floor, then sank it. Ludmenti tried to climb the slope created, but disappeared somewhere beneath. Now the matter was trivial in the frog’s rarely-bothered mind: just return to the suite, fetch Mrs. Toad, and exit through the window. Except the door was blocked, at the edge of the collapsed floor, by the very guard Ludmenti had left with. Tiddalik thought her some kind of upright crab, except she had but one claw and it was mounted on the end of a polearm.

This was actually the carapace of a crab removed and fashioned into a suit of armor, part of the lord’s complete reliance on the materials of the shore to build his empire. When Tiddalik tested her mettle by lunging toward the door another ingenious invention retaliated, as there was a lever inside her weapon that allowed her to open and close the claw with all the force of the living animal that had grown it.

Instead of getting pinched Tiddalik chose to tuck and fall to the lower floor, which he thought would just put him up against Gumbonero once more. Looking right, he found a small legion of upright crabs charging his way, pinching in chorus. Looking left, nothing, not even his foe. Where had he gone?

It was unpleasant to do so, he didn’t have the mind for it, mostly because his mind was meant for sunbathing, but Tiddalik had to prioritize rather than explore the question of Ludmenti’s whereabouts. He’d been found out, and after checking his empty paw to make sure, knew he hadn’t rescued Mrs. Toad and was not dragging her along to freedom.

Ultimately he was going to tie with the Death-or-Glory toads, and lose to the rat, an indignity that now had to be accepted. The only way to settle Zamshy Lamshy’s riled nerves over his ‘mother’s’ attack was to convince him it was easily repelled by the crabby guards of the sand castle. He had to trust Mrs. Toad’s taming of the cock and hope she would be safe.

The faster he escaped the more competent her protectors; the frog made it his priority to shoot himself out the side of the Castle of the Grip as quickly as possible. The guards were closing in, discourteously denying him the time needed to reorient himself within the granular labyrinth. A random direction was chosen.

Obliterating the sand wall with his back was as trivial as he’d hoped, leaving him to wonder how the castle still stood when a butterfly tourist resting on a parapet seemed capable of bringing it down, yet Tiddalik was also left, one chamber over, wrapped up in the arms of Lord Gumbonero Ludmenti. His captor’s beach glass pauldrons sparkled on either side, reflecting and warping his malicious expression.

“As I predicted,” he crooned in the frog’s ear once he managed to locate it. “You move just like a natural flood. You should know these halls are designed to redirect and neutralize such a force of nature without sacrificing any load-bearing embankments.”

“What about your load-bearing embankments?”

“Wha- These are my-” Tiddalik produced another propelling blast of water that should’ve been cascading down the fifth tier of the sugar district’s decorative fountain at that moment. Both bodies were thrown into another wall, which collapsed and buried them in black sand. Aggravated and blind, the frog kept spraying until he felt the man’s arms leave his shoulders.

Finally free, he tried to stand. Alright, not finally free. The weight of the wet sand piled on him was too much to overcome without spraying his way loose once again. Then, eyes blinking away grit, he started to see something. Yet another sandy hallway, and yet again no Ludmenti. This time Tiddalik did focus on where he could have vanished to.

Listening in, he heard guards floors above, the chitinous clack of their armor in need of an oilcan full of melted butter. Something else, below, closer. One pair of boots running… no… bare feet? The sand between his toes must have been like an extra sense for a man so practiced in what the frog now had to concede was some kind of annoying art.

The run became a slide. Those tended to go down, so he was even closer now. Tiddalik’s throat engorged, filled with turbulent waters. The cannon was loaded. One eyelash poked through a sandy wall and he would let loose. Perhaps he could risk it if the sound was close enough. Where was it now? Gone…

“Ha!” Arms burst through the wall behind and squeezed his burgeoning throat, sending far too much water down the wrong pipe, incapacitating Tiddalik even more than the lord had intended. “You haven’t seen the dungeon yet! Let me show you.” Long lordly toes dug into the floor, gave him traction the slimy amphibian couldn’t hope to match; he was being dragged again.

Though it hurt tremendously, Tiddalik increased the pressure in his gorge until Ludmenti’s headlock could not suppress it, the magic fire hose spraying once more. The power should’ve sent them both flying by the challenger’s estimation, but the lord had claimed that title long before, and done much more with it to date.

His toes raked across the floor as the tide pushed him back, but there were strips of heartier and looser sand built into it which he had memorized. In a fight he could enhance his own footing or weaken his opponent’s, and here he used them to stabilize any time Tiddalik’s power threatened to separate the two.

Neighboring walls were destroyed, allowing his crab guards to vault over the melting remnants and come to his side, their assistance completely unnecessary. Another foot in the sturdiest strip of sand yet stopped him from twisting; he forcibly aimed Tiddalik’s mouth at the ceiling. Then, surprisingly, he released the frog.

The geyser destroyed the roof, brought it down on Tiddalik, who ceased his effluence and shielded his head with both arms. Wet sand smacking his whole body did no damage to him, but it weighed down a tight circle of the surrounding floor, thus collapsing it a moment later, dropping him into a dungeon cell of rough walls strewn with sharp shards of seashell.

Looking up he spied the leaning head of a gloating Gumbonero through the hole, as well as the ringing claws of his guards’ pikes. Tiddalik still didn’t grasp that he was trapped, throat pouch filling with water again.

“I wouldn’t do that,” the Blefuscan warned. “You’re surrounded by a sand called tropical sharp: grade five. It’s almost entirely composed of many-edged shell daggers. Your wet breath will fill a whirlpool with them; you’ll throw yourself into a meat grinder.” Tiddalik paused. No proof was necessary, as he now registered the pain in his feet. Just from standing he’d created several tiny slits in the webbing between his toes. They bled into the sand, minuscule canals outlining the largest and most jagged daggers in crimson.

Gumbonero then threatened to turn the intruder over to the cockatrice, but the way he spat the word out made Tiddalik wonder. He didn’t seem to like the cock’s taste. Thinking quickly, which was the same here as talking quickly given he was having something resembling a conversation with a distant Vesperos, the frog borrowed something to ask.

“Are you loyal to Zamshy Lamshy?”

“Everyone’s loyal to those who can kill with a glance,” was his vague answer. Tiddalik continued to pick a distant brain, mine and refine subtle ores, until another question bubbled up out of his well of a cell.

“The statues aren’t dead. I bet something as little as a lovingly applied bee sting could rouse them from their stony slumber.” Vesperos, despite keeping to his own business in a cell of his own most of the time, was still aware of the lord’s favored position with his aunt. He hoped Ludmenti had been informed, or discerned on his own, that another related god with matching loyalties was living overhead. Through Tiddalik’s eyes he saw the man mull the statement over. Then, with a flick of his wrist, he dismissed all his claws. Moments later they were alone.

“Are you affiliated with Vesperos?” he asked pointedly to replace the sharp tips of his many crab claws.

“Yes,” Tiddalik admitted with permission, “and he’s listening in right now. We’re challengers, and we stand against Zamshy Lamshy. We want Hestia restored.”

“Houyhnhnm hinny! So Minimil is not as full of craven cowards as I thought. How many are you?” When the frog answered five he gritted his teeth and wound one end of his mustache around a finger. “Always five around here, so strange. I’ll never understand everyone’s preoccupation with that digit,” he said while surrounded by his preoccupation with sand, to a creature equally preoccupied with water. “Tell me, what have you learned of this monster? My own spies have turned up very little. It’s not easy getting the seamless eggties he is allied with to leak.”

The coalition speaking through Tiddalik chose not to antagonize him by mentioning how simple it was for them, since they’d deigned to speak to a working class of eggty rather than the bankers and statesmen. Instead they shared the story of Zamshy’s purported mark, and how it could possibly have come from Ukridge Farms.

“Ukridge? Hmm, this name curdles familiar.” The Blefuscan continued worrying his facial hair until he managed to tease a memory out of it. “Ah! Yes, it all makes sense now. So that’s what he’s after with the concert: revenge.”

“We’re planning on stopping him, so you could share with us,” Tiddalik croaked. The cell made him literally itchy in the feet, figuratively itchy everywhere else. “My feet h-” Gumbonero extracted a paper from his pocket, unfurled it and aimed it down into the hole. It was one of the newer posters for the world’s smallest violinist concert, featuring the diplomat guest Rea Brass. The challengers confirmed they’d seen it, but didn’t know the significance. The lord grinned and kicked his feet smugly, despite having only figured it out himself moments ago.

“When my spies did not succeed with the eggties, I had them turn their attention to this man, seeing as the invitation appeared to be Zamshy’s first political act. Rea Brass is currently the ratcatcher for Axminster.”

None of those self-tasked with the Challenge Obscene were experts or aficionados of the dread game of Little Wars that now ran the world, but the topic was so pervasive, especially in Minimil, that they all knew what ‘ratcatcher’ here meant. It was now a much more dignified position within governments: a euphemism for recruiter which was itself a euphemism for conscripter.

A ratcatcher’s job was to build a nation or a region’s army for Little Wars, and there were many sources to explore from the fae realm to various descendants of Aesop’s morality tales to myrmidon colonies. And… to coops.

“Back in 1921 Brass was just a creditor,” Lord Ludmenti elucidated, “who was owed a great deal of money by known smoke salesman Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge. The man’s latest scheme was a simple chicken and egg enterprise, but he happened to luck into not one, but three layers of eggties.” He now read from the back of the poster, where much of the information was sloppily written. The lord‘s diligence in sand architecture did not extend to his record keeping, despite his high office. Even the construction plans were drawn in sand, memorized, and then promptly erased; that way no one could contradict him when he claimed a certain feature had been ‘on the drawing board’ the entire time.

“And those hens were,” he continued, “Pricilla, Harriet, and Aunt Elizabeth, the last of whom was described as a ‘Bolshevist hen’ with a ‘spinster’s snigger’. I would bet this hayloft that our cockatrice was laid by this Aunt Elizabeth, and has come here, trampled our hierarchy, in her name.”

“Why?”

“Because there was a raid on Ukridge Farms, where all of Stanley’s creditors showed up, ready to dismantle the place board by board. Ukridge had grown attached to the eggties, refused to sell them despite their immense value, and was trying to instead sell their expertise, at which he miserably failed.

Brass was one of those that showed up rabid for what he was owed. They couldn’t get their hands on Stanley, who apparently fled. The last word on him was that he was trying to start another coop with ducks. His creditors couldn’t agree on how to split the abandoned spoils, and much of it was destroyed in the process. And of the three layers, only Aunt Elizabeth was killed.

So, assuming that Bolshevist brooded our dragon, Zamshy, homeless, came to Minimil to achieve his current form, with which he has stolen enough authority to invite Ratcatcher Brass to a concert. Given Minimil’s status in Little Wars he can hardly say no. He will be pressured to leave his own stolen coop, as he now runs his operation out of Ukridge Farms, come here, and get himself killed… two nights from tonight.”

The parties inside and outside the cell sat on the revelation for several minutes, during which Ludmenti had to shoo away several peeking guards. They weren’t being disloyal, simply trying to remind him that half his work was collapsing outside, though he saw that mostly as an opportunity to experiment anew. He’d already deduced the problem was caused by missing water, and that all of it was stored in the frog below him, so he was essentially sitting next to a serene pond and dipping his feet in.

“I cannot expose the cock without endangering myself,” he told his prisoner. “I won’t do so. It’s already been proven Minimil can be wrestled away from its rulers by a single challenging hand, and I’m the one who proved it! I will, however, offer you some surreptitious assistance. That way my goddess will know my contribution when she returns.

The concert will be your only opportunity to strike before Zamshy installs more permanent government or gets us destroyed by the Brits after he kills Brass. Both of them will be at the Bootyard. Normally you’d need a ticket to enter, but I can provide you silent aerial entrance. Just be atop the abandoned anthill shortly before it starts.

The stands they’ve added for the event have an empty section in their upper reaches, a cockpit, where Zamshy will nestle to watch. All the guests beneath him are being provided visors so they don’t accidentally look up and get turned to stone. That means your entrance should go completely unseen.” A guard dared to yell for his attention, which would be dealt with later. “That is all I will do for you. Good luck Vesperos. Bring her back to me.”

Gumbonero’s head disappeared, leaving Tiddalik, of itchy mind and feet alike, to contemplate. He didn’t have long however, as a guard quickly appeared at the barred door of the cell and released him before making a show of expelling him out onto the street. He thought it best to leave Loftplace swiftly, but Vesperos convinced him to find the nearest storm drain and, not swiftly at all, restore the waters he had drained so the place could return to its regular level of frustration with their lord’s layout.

Then the bee instructed Tiddalik to meet them at the dry dock, as it seemed the best base of operations available. The ship wouldn’t be leaving any time soon, none of the eggties allied to Zamshy would show their drawn faces there with the riffraff, and the oddball eggties had seemed welcoming enough. Vesperos had hoped to take them all up to Dauber’s Comb, but much of the air traffic was still grounded out of fear of midair petrification and stone rain.

No, they would have to listen to the boat creak all around them, its contribution to their huddled discussion of cockamamie and desperate schemes.

Continued in the Finale