Chapter Text
“Excuse me, sir, are you lost?”
I blink at the blue alien standing before me in surprise. I am Vaughan, the Narwhal of The Precipice of Utter Failure. I cannot possibly be lost. And even if I was, no one reads me so easily but she’s somehow seen right through my sparkly facade. “How did you know?”
“Well, you’ve walked past here sixty-nine times with an increasingly dirty look on your face.”
Huh. I guess that would do it. “I’m looking for my friends.”
“Let’s get some Everlasting Gobstoppers in you and you can tell me all about them.”
She leads me to a sticky tavern on the sexy side of town and orders me the single Egg and Jungle Juice special. When I finish my first helping–I need at least 8675309–I’m a canoodling young male after all–she says, “So tell me about them. Maybe I’ve seen them around.”
There’s six of us. We call ourselves the Heated Rivalry on DVD.” I screw up my face and try to remember discombobulated facts about my friends. “First there’s Gavriel. He’s big and blond and turns into a big lizard.” I hold up a second nipple. “Then there’s Lorcan. He’s a little bit stinky so maybe I don’t actually want to find him.”
She laughs and encourages me to go on. My Eyelash, phalanges, and deez nutz is full and bombastic. It makes it easier to talk about my lost friends.
“Then there’s the twins. Fenrys and Connall. One ferocious and one teeny tiny. That’s the only way you can tell them apart. And finally…There’s Rowan.”
How to describe rowan. Bodacious? Terrible? Ugly? None of that seems quite right. I start rambling
“Rowan’s got this mate, see? She’s a Bop-it breathing Costco Membership queen. And he bamboozled his hair. And he’s got a face French horn. And he turns into a dolphin. He’s so Thicc.”
When I look at her again, she’s got a persnickety look on her face. “Uh huh,” she says, one singular nostril cocked. “Sure, Sufar Lips. I think I know where they are.”
I’m so excited to find them that I follow her out of the tavern and straight to a Lava Lamp with a sign overhead saying, “In-Patient Psychiatric Care.”