Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The sun rises back over the Hedge, and paints the woodland site over with a gloss of orange. In such a warm morning, a casual demeanor overtakes the open surface, while insecurity and disorder runs rampant in the hidden shadows behind the trees. The air sings its song over only the brush the sunlight meets. The darkness in the cracks of a fractured forest faces silence.

Yet another sound to be heard is the clicking of remote buttons once again, only now free in this feral environment. From the purple throne of the TV lounge, Heather’s spiritless eyes tint themselves with a lighter shade of blue, and her ears indulge in none of it.

Some radical teen babbles straight at her empty face from the TV. “NEWWW Mega-Heated Headbands ! Remote-controlled and sure to warm up a cold forehead! Sing it, happy customers!” 

The happy customers perfectly perform a completely improvised jingle on the spot: “It’s a fire on your head! It’s a fire on your head!”

“The warm ‘n cozy kind that thaws numb fingers ‘n bakes Grandma’s cookies! WOOOW!!”

" Ohhh we're boutta get into summer weatheeer , that's terrible marketiing …" Heather yawns. 

On the next channel, the Sniffer’s voice only cringes her. “I present to you - the Depelter Turbo 1 point 9!”

His words don’t amuse her. They don’t stop the endless pendulum of her limbs off the edge, her front lying over the armrest of the chair. “They’re never gonna get that extra tenth.” RJ’s icky snoring in his nap beside her on the seat added something at least.

“But don’t fret, Sally! We'll get that extra tenth!”

“No you won't,” she yells back, happening to have RJ awoken as collateral.

“We will!” The Sniffer insists on keeping a wide smile, from cheek to cheek, plastered over his face.

The TV guy of the advert parades through all the disclaiming whatnot and serves its plates to Death’s table over the atmospheric happy music: “Product only available for legal purchase in select states (we’re looking at you, Texas). Misuse of this product may lead to serious injury, substantial property and/or satellite damage, nationwide power outages, a deep sense of regret in your financial history, intense stinging sensations, traumatic events, nightmares of said traumatic events, cuts, burns, obscure medical conditions, and potential dea-”

“Pshhh.” RJ cut off the TV. Sticking itself to the power button, his finger doesn’t move. “Just beatin’ a dead horse with that thing.”

Verne’s silhouette engulfs him, and removes the feign light from the sun he so hoped to fake pure blithe underneath. Unfortunately, shadows never die, and their resentment remains within those borders.

RJ leans his head into his hand. “Oh, hey Verne.” The only bit of energy he’s able to jut out from his vocal cords tumbles over itself. “What's up. What's shakin'. Remember your dreamcatcher this time?”

He speaks nothing.

RJ rises from the chair. “Right. No dreamcatcher.”

Verne keeps his back erected tall in RJ’s presence. “Do you see what this is?” He bends his shell to the side and points out an obscure location RJ would’ve been too lazy to elucidate for himself. On the side, marked in the center, there's a miniscule crack in the hard surface. It’s not even noticeable without proper direction such as this.

“Oh that's a nice birthmar-”

Verne's flat foot demolishes RJ's stubbiest toe.

RJ’s eyes explode from their sockets. “-aaaAAAARK!!”

His bones mold into jelly, tripping right back into the seat beside Heather, jerking the whole thing and crashing against her. At that very second he thrusts the throbbing toe into his mouth from his raised leg.

Verne speaks nothing.

RJ glances up to him. He doesn’t respond for a whole second. Like he’s waiting for someone else to acknowledge his own suffering first. Whatever. What he could manage would have to do. “ MMMMMMM !!”

“Are you gonna be a big boy for this talk, RJ?” Verne asks with a caustic grin.

The muffled objections he blabbers out, without substance, points Verne to the toe in his mouth, obstructing his ability to speak like a plug in the faucet of his inconsiderate line of reasoning. Frankly, Verne appreciates the blessing graciously, if only for a second or two.

Irked by RJ’s trouble, Heather only has so many ways to assist in a not-as-awkward way. “ Here …” She plucks the toe out of his mouth, freezing his expression, and drags it down underneath her leg to apply constant pressure.

Like a dog, RJ whimpers, “Thank you…” and releases the tension in his muscles to slump back with a strained sigh. “...so much…”

“I’m an ol’ rock, chipped away by battle scars, RJ,” Verne remarks, presenting such ‘battle scar’ again. “Y’know why ?”

“Me?”

“No. Calling what you’ve done ‘scars’ would be generous.” Thus marks the beginning of his pacing. “What you might not know -”

“Can I just turn the TV back on?”

“-is that this place used to be so much lonelier. It started simple as ever back then. Just survive . Trust the tail . That’s what I told myself. I never knew that, someday, I’d have a family to look after. But that’s just how the river flows ! Stella ‘n I, we had a nice system going, but when Hammy came … something was… different . It WAS a family. Well it took me many, MANY years to figure that OUT obviously, when everyone else came along, but you get the idea. Anyway, I know the Log inside and out . Literally . The more cracks I found in the bark, the more I discovered about these people too . Now, who do you think’s more qualified to speak for the good of the home here? Do you think it’s-?”

RJ dozes off. And he dozes a bit too far from the material world. The emptiness clogging his ears hums a missing note through both ends of his head. But the ladder Verne’s voice suddenly climbs in his speech awakens him, still not curing the sluggish void enclosing within, highly discursive. RJ tends to his boredom by scouting out all the jumbled deposits of food they have spread around the site. Each and every one. The bases of these hills devour the floor they walk on, creating some narrow trails where they do not need to be. They starve the grass underneath, creating mudded patches in their wake. They’re chunks of land taken from the meadows of their vault, sinking their farms into valleys. Clear action must be dealt.

“-And that’s why I am ASSERTING to you , RJ, that without this home, we are NOT the same family. All the care we’ve given each other… it was all founded here. Everything we’ve learned about each other… here. Is this something we can AFFORD to lose? A TRUE home ? Everything we’ve got… it started here. One log .”

So then it hits him: With that old cave as a bank, their moving labors will be slashed in half. Why ? Rather than moving everything out at once, storing for the long-run benefits the outcome he sees. He sees it so clearly out of Verne’s little dome he’s bouncing his voice through. That new location they’d surely uncover, flourishing with goods, and a whole cave-chamber of leftovers to spare.

“What we have right now ? Okay. Hammy doing who KNOWS what in the lake?! Okay. Spending my whole life … living in some mossy log that’s rotting away, year after year? It’s all okay, because at the end of it… we’re home .”

Heather’s left to stick around for the show. But she’s a goat in the stands, wimpishly out of place without grass to chew on. “Okay yeah, good for you ‘n stuff, but this all feels pretty personal , like... I don’t think I should be-”

Verne stops in place to face them. “And that’s okay too, Heather! But here’s what’s not okay … You , RJ, thinking you can move us to some ‘better place’ with ‘better’ things that we’d be ‘better’ off with! If you can’t recognize that this IS the best and ONLY BEST place for us, how do you think you’ll find something better ? There’s no other place like this. None . We’re not inconveniencing ourselves like what’d happen if we WENT searching for some nEw HoMe. We have to treat this like a sacred duty , bestowed upon us by ANYTHING THAT MAKES SENSSSE !! This is something we have to protect at all costs , and I am fully willing AND capable to do so. Thank you. Applaud away .”

Some moments pass before either respond.

Finally RJ yawns, “Bravo. Brilliant speech. Oop, hold on, think I feel a tear comin’...” Heather’s personal space becomes meaningless to him once he’s inclined to stretch across the entire seat and relieve himself from all the condensed lumps forming in his freedom from the lecture. Suddenly, a toaster dings with impeccable timing. “Oop, hold the tears. STRUDEL’S DONE!!”

Heather takes hold of the TV remote and chucks it at a toaster off to the side, angled towards them by the base of a tree. After hitting a lever, the 2 toasted pastries launch in a perfect arc into RJ and Heather’s arms.

Heather’s first strike erupts magma filling onto her tongue. “ OOOOOH , it’s hot ! Oh GOD that’s so hot.”

“HAMMY!” RJ claps.

Hammy runs up between RJ and Verne, saluting his loyalty to the former.

If Verne can’t be dealt the attention of his opponents, the least he can do is question himself rhetorically: “Did- did ANYTHING I just say matter?”

RJ props open Hammy’s mouth and pulls out 2 cold packs of icing from both his stuffed cheeks, miraculously (and unbelievably) spotless. “Y’know Verne…” Clearly his drowsiness hadn’t dwindled a bit judging by the distinctive swing in his dead voice. “You were right when you said it, I dunno, some time ago … We are runnin’ outta room here. After all, we had to resort to using Hammy’s mouth as our icing storage unit.”

Hammy adds, “In fact, these cheeks have a cooler installed too-!”

“ Sooooo I think we’ve got a caaave to fill. Yeeeaaahhh …”

Verne’s shocked passion stings his countenance. “Oh, so now you’re DYING to get back there, you ‘n your pack of… STRUDEL wolves?!”

Fresh-baked scraps and slathered icing coolant cover his face with the bite of the strudel. “‘Tis merely the food who calls, good sir!” He points aimlessly into the air. “‘Tis merely the food .”

XXX

A drumroll sounds. 

RJ stands later at the mouth of Vincent’s cave with determination. Its jagged teeth threaten to swallow him whole, but when Heather snakes up to his side, he grins, and feels no reservation towards the darkness. Hammy zips up the staircase on the right and swerves along into the cave after they proceed.

“Rolecall for Team RPS !” RJ yanks back the curtain to the backroom, pushing them along as they fly in. “Go! Go! Go!”

“‘Possum for paper!”

“Squirrel for scissors!”

RJ himself readies to race inside. “And raccoons are always rock-hard. Er, always in the brain . It’s the brain. Yeah.”

Inside, RJ slams the bag down, and they all 3 dump it out. RJ fills the hyper silence while they unpack: “Just think - the more junk we stow away, the more junk we’ve got to bring in !”

“Or we could just eat it,” says Heather.

“Hey, can you pass that Nutty Buddy?” Hammy asks her. “I get hungry when I think of food.”

XXX

A drumroll sounds. 

With his group inside the concealment and nurturing of the Log, Verne approaches the empty box of cookies being used as a podium. “Bring forth … the forehead belt .”

Tiger steadies his knees and bends at Verne’s feet with a yellow bandana. Verne takes it and goes to wrap it around his head with pride, only for it to blind his eyes. He removes it and retries, only for it to fit tight over the top of his face, over his pestered eyebrows. Unfortunately, none of that minimal space over his eyes necessarily qualified as a ‘forehead’. So instead he just puts it as a weird lump on top of his head. They’d get the idea.

“Team Oak , FAAAAALLL IN!” he commands.

Stella, Tiger, and the porcupines, one-by-one flop yellow bandanas onto their heads in unison.

“Was ‘Oak’ really the best you could do ?” Stella remarks.

“I figured we’d stick to the 3-letter theme.” Verne commences the opening of his overruling oration: “First of all, I’d like to, uh- thank you all for being here… today. It really means a lot to me, and uh-”

“CAN WE FIGHT YET!?” Spike shouts from the back.

“ Hush !” goes Penny.

In case he had much to begin with, the remainder of Verne’s confidence splats flat on its face. One inch removed, and his train derailed. Stella, closest to his side, clears a demon from her throat and tilts her glaring head forward at him. She sends her spirit - her flame - over for him to fan.

“Okay… Okay .” Verne straps on the cape of a sovereign, dictating tone: “ Listen up ! I WANT YOU ALL to-!”

That look Stella shoots him again… this time, it’s barely readable underneath the white hairs sprawling over her face. From all he can comprehend, it’s either the attitude or execution he’s got an imbalance in. His mouth speaks these thoughts for him: “Whadda I need, more attitude or execution ?”

Stella slaps her head, then blows up the hairs off of her face from the vent of her lips. She pounds a thumb onto the middle of her chest, into her heart. Combined with the gesture, Verne manages to read the deep emerald wholeheartedness of her green, uncovered eyes, and figures out the rest.

“From the heart… Show it in the eyes …”

Verne looks at the podium in front of him, and frowns. He pushes it aside and steps through the Log to speak to the new team directly. Like he knew to do, he lets his eyes speak of his true emotions, both of deep concern and gratitude.

The outcome is a bit of a smile. “Everyone… this is our one chance . We know what we’re fighting for.”

Fortunately, Penny is able to smother one of the kids’ mouths with a fat hand before he bursts out with something irrelevant, at Verne’s brief mention of a certain f-word that ain’t short enough to be that one.

Verne examines the tunnel. “We’re standing in our own home right now.” He chuckles, “Think about it. We stored everything in here. Even ourselves. But sometimes I wonder just if it’d feel the same without a true family .”

Everyone glows their grins for his heart to absorb, and collect into a penny jar.

As a grand rally, Verne declares, “By the time winter comes this year, we’ll be resting easier here than we ever have! You heard it from me, folks.”

“We’re stickin’ with the Log no matter what ,” Stella ensures. “Rememb’uh that.”

And Tiger bows all too solemnly. “For all my nine lives , I’d lay down one just for this.”

“Alright, death is where I draw the line though.”

“Just… thank you all for this,” Verne laughs before addressing the skunk specifically. “Stella, I know it wasn’t always-”

She stops him quickly. “Don’t … bring that stuff up again. Right now, we’re livin’ in the NOW now.”

“ NOW now. Right. Now now. Wait!... We’re still missing something .”

“What’re we missing there, Verne-o?” comes Lou.

“Yo, what we’re missing is the fighting!” Bucky scoffs.

“I can help with that,” Quillo says.

Verne returns to himself a fidgety nature until Stella steps forward to his side. Suddenly, he’s reminded of some thought. A thought once thought before. He brings out the attitude again - from the heart, and through the eyes. His heart beats faster, and stronger. It straightens his back and sends the beam of determination out his eyes like a jet plane. Each word propels its jets and conquers the mountains, for both its wings are not alone. So, he’s ready. And true. 

“What we’re missing is a plan . And a good one! Huddle.”

What Verne says perks up the radar ears of RJ overhearing from his casual pace past the Log: “What are we?!”

“FORAGERS!!”

RJ says it quietly to himself: “ Well Verne, you’ve just challenged a raccoon to a heisting match . Don’t even pray you won’t regret it. You will .”

The starting pistol blows a round that day, for the disastrous race that’s about to ensue - a week-long dash down a molten hill.

“Status report!” comes RJ’s order from the front patio of the next target house. Both teams prepare themselves at the start, itching to catch the signal.

Hammy rises alert on the rooftop. His sight darts around the fantastic scene from above, every lane of houses across the suburbs presenting new sights, colors, and personality. All into the horizon these settlements stretch - an endless sea of artificiality. The orange sea monster was found nowhere lurking in these waters, no sign of danger around. After their last encounter with him, scouting for the Sniffer became priority 1. Hammy runs back to the edge of the roof to confirm. A single “Nope!” is hollered down.

No track’s never issued a race or two. By the time Hammy of all people is able to panic and tag along, the athletes are already inside. The first narrow entrance hall, ridden by a web of lasers, makes for a field day all over again. They leap and twist and trample between the wires of the misshapen grid and leave no room for error. Their movements clash and confuse the eye like the boulders tumbling off a mountaintop, swept up by the fluid winds of one dynamic highway. In the tracks left on the sheet of fine dust another’s foot follows, but never intersects. They might as well apply for their own acting routine given the orderly chaos somehow unachievable through strict rehearsal. When chaos occurs in chaos, it thrives .

Ozzie trails behind, holding comparative gaiety in the smoothness of his steps. They contribute none to the volume of the fray. He meets his tenacious team at the doormat of one sudden megaplex; variably so, the high-roofed living room startles the firmness in his toes. What jarring complexity it would be to examine, if only the group threw thoughtful glances more than a second instead of the frantic scattering of their faces, including one new trio of members to Ozzie’s organized heist group: the porcupine kids.

No such… really intense , fiery enthusiasm , to put it… is contained in Ozzie’s static stance. He still yet holds the mug of routine quenching, having not boiled out the bottom. “And so , our order of business consists of -” 

Down he scales the list, while their heads are lost to the heights, fighting to unravel the same wings that could diverge the earth and its touchless clouds now sought to be obtained. Hidden by the back of a sleek couch facing the dead case of a fireplace, a small stair divot leads down into the lax pit of the room. Verne can’t help but find a raccoon’s tail to be slipping out of sight past the frame against the wall where rug meets tile. Clanking immediately ensues from the kitchen. Down the pit, on the left.

“C’mon! Let’s go!” Verne proclaims to personify the proactive actions of the others.

“-Alllllllrighty then, don’t mind I !” Ozzie performs his obligatory awkward-moment-no-one-cares-for jig. Heist groups became void. There were only ‘heists’ and ‘groups’ in a time like this.

They take to their ‘business’.

XXX

The blank photo square on a ‘Read All About Me!’ poster is taken by a pencil diagram of Heather. Along the bottom edge, symbols of only her greatest interests stamp the 3 ‘super cool fact’ squares fit for… super cool facts. Food. Music. Food again. “Heather,” RJ narrates. He creates her profile so earnestly like any student of the week would, if they took the role of an interviewer. “‘Possum. Nickname: ‘Possum pal’. Role: Maximum swagger (as proclaimed by the subject).” Inside the star on the center of the paper, her tail comes to life on the page. “Star trait: A sentient… butt-hand.”

RJ documents her prowess on the clipboard as she goes, securing their first scores of food from the highest cabinet in the room. She swings each can, cup, and jar ‘round way to drop them off from her butt-hand on every beat exactly.

“ Truly a marvel at work! ”

A leftover Arnie’s sandwich box must’ve hid from her nose in the corner, as it now comes down for RJ.

“ Favorite food: Arnie’s , ” he scribbles as an extra note.

On lined paper, considerably more readable and organized, Verne documents the same profiles. “ Stella . Fierce, but defensive. Ready to aim, but rare to fire . ”

One human proceeds to exit from the bathroom so lackadaisically that Team Oak seems to be the ones in a rush as they just so happen to parade by from the top of a staircase, coming up with a whole party-size box of assorted chip bags. In the confrontation, a toilet plunger enters the woman’s grasp. Stella jumps in front of her fellows and points that back end back. Just like that, the woman flails into the bathroom and locks herself inside without hesitation. Stella snaps fingers for the others to take their leave.

Verne’s tone loosens. “ Her biggest loyalty is to herself . But she knows her place with us. ”

The team applauds her back in the lobby of the living room. Jokingly, she nudges her fist rough onto Verne's shoulder before linking her arm around one of, who else, but Tiger's front limbs.

“Tiger iiiis about as loyal as a guy can get. If I've won Stella, I've won him. He's a royal thinker. Royal attitude, royal courage, royal… appetite… Buuuut- he's uh, he's working on it.”

Shortly following the previous event, Tiger snaps his head around from the chilly fridge of the kitchen after picking up a call from Stella. His diet speaks a different story than his typical demeanor - he’s forced by the worry in his stomach to spit out the plumpness of the fish jammed in his jaw. Indeed, he only bears insult to himself by allowing the need to devour devour his own mind . Luckily, he’s still just as fit. Thus, he pounces across the floor in the direction of his beloved.

Stella grabs onto Tiger’s shoulder and has him leap her up a giant couch in the living room. A simple display, but highly representative of a symbiotic bond.

“ Where one faults, the other follows . ”

Verne sits and smiles to himself in regards to his own display of writing prowess. “Oh yeah , that- that’s deep,” he thinks aloud.

For RJ’s next poster, he seems to have acquired a vandalized page, colored crayon splashed all over. A piece of the paper was chewed off in the corner.

“Hammy,” he only briefly starts. “W-wait Hammy? HAMMY!? You WROTE ON THIS!! HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO HAVE MY MOMENT-?!” He resorts to an (attempted) pleasant on-demand reading of Hammy’s colorful work: 

“‘Hammy… Squir-rel. My friends make me happy, like Cousin Heather whenever she scratches that extra tender spot on my back.’... Aw, that’s nice,” he commends, before reading again. “‘I am hungry.’”

Twirling corkscrews take Hammy on his own smooth coaster between backyards in the lane. At each chain fence he leaps through the gaps, passing a yard’s length by the second. His apparent hunger drives his car more than the flat level of the track ever could. “WEEE! WEEE! WWWEEE!”

" ‘I am a star becaaauuuse… I am very fast.’... So true, so true. "

The crisply-tattooed hotdog Hammy steals from a steaming grill transfers its scolding heat to his hands. It flaps like a jumping jelly bean around in his possession while he attempts to extinguish the smoking energy exploding off the skin. Those stings don’t end when he goes backwards through the fences again.

"WEEE! Ow. WEEE! Ow! WWWEEE!"

“Oh heyyy ,” RJ delights from the other side of the Hedge. “Here’s a lil’ doodle of a flaming hotdog!”

Glowing to perfection, the steaming hotdog missile arcs like a dolphin over the leaves and rains down right along RJ’s trajectory. The glare from the high sun combusts it into a deadly javelin of fire.

“ Hammy . Hammy is… ” Verne fails to recognize the circumstances bypassing the gates of his history. “ ... not … on our team, actually. ”

It’s almost poignant to have split the old road. Stella the supervisor stares up alongside Verne from the clipboard at Hammy in his speedy prime, making laps around a backyard picnic. 2 pairs of brown and gray arms secure the goods from behind a large bush at the corner of the yard. RJ and Heather fling the boxes through the Hedge as they come. Stella huffs and shakes her head.

But without their kid, she can’t settle for talk alone. She grabs the clipboard and yanks it to the ground. No words.

XXX

The trio of RJ, Heather, and Hammy make a proud enough performance from their found food at the base of the cliff below the new official storage cave made from Vincent’s old. And without the entrance of Verne and the others, it was set to remain that way. But they slog through with their massive bundle, including an entire box of chip bags far beyond RJ’s expectations of his performance in even just their first rivalry heist.

So the 3 end up stabbing themselves with the short end of the stick… or the long end from Verne’s point of view. He knew they were now up there in that cave. He knew they could only be angrily storing the sum of both teams in the back room. And he grins. He grins from the base of the cliff and pokes at his own amusement. He spies out their reactions through the rocks. They were just that obvious . 

His hubris only lasts a moment. One car honks to another behind them, from the broad, endless road, and his x-ray sight fades. The rusty, dented car in front broke down - its front hood popped open, and the driver ejected. The glossy sports car behind, the ‘viCtiM’ of course, scolds the audacity for such an inconvenience to take place. Who bears the burden of both ? Possibly it’s a double-burden on one side . The community of oaks and pines in the whole wide forest reveals itself to Verne again. The forest is an inconvenience to these creatures. It’s something to chop down. It’s vulnerable . But it gets in the way. Logs will fall. Verne only gets a headache trying to count the days he’s known a fallen log himself. THE Log. What a manic comparison. If a log falls over a street, can it really be considered the criminal? Will the hollow innards of his heartly home be crushed twice as fast under the pressure?

His worries return him to the home site. His shell contains the shivers overtaking his torso as he scans the calendar. The last square of the month he jabs with a weak finger… is the 25th.

“That means there’s only… 18 days left . Give or take.”

“Verne, quit countin’ days ‘n start countin’ pays!” Stella’s incoming rush gives him sudden dismay. He flinches his neck forward and takes a breath.

But her words drive some interest in his countenance. From RJ’s arms across the site, boxes of snacks and treats leave his ownership to be distributed to Heather and Hammy. They take their pays with great gusto at a day’s hard work, then chase after the raccoon right back into the suburbs just before the sun sets. A paycheck. That idea somehow causes Verne to squint an eye at HIS followers, scattered about.

Stella stares at the speechless Verne. "If yuh gonna keep these folks on our side I think yuh’d bett’uh raise the check," she relays in a whisper. "Oz-man's still lookin' miiighty free…"

Ozzie is indeed not doing much, just enjoying what he has (AKA a nice creamy cup of late-night coffee) in the dedicated pillow lounge underneath one of the open umbrellas.

Verne stomps forward. The sweltering heat of competition now furrows his brow as if the sweat from his non-existent forehead crushed it down over his eyes. And underneath the peacefully setting sun, Ozzie remains benign. Verne enrichens the lush flame in the horizon. “Alright , RJ. We can play this game.”

XXX

‘Team RPS’ seated themselves on the side of a single-story house. This is the last house on the block. Shrouded in secrecy . The walls painted a solid white, and the roof simple brick, this place only has one thing to hide: A beautiful development in the circle of life. Thankfully, a multitude of lawn chairs stacked up over each other gives them the elevation they need to discover a channel of live natural phenomenons through the open window of a dim bedroom. RJ and Heather observe the human mates in their den with a taut level of fascination. 

Hammy makes sure to document the event from the cupholder on the armrest, where his legs are stuffed and bent into. Every time he clicks the camera, it only flashes another blast right into his face. Nonetheless, he continues snapping great shots of himself with the camera facing backwards.

“Wow,” Heather comments to RJ with a spiffy new safari hat of her own. “This’s just like that wildlife show.”

She flips the camera around for Hammy. He wouldn’t wanna miss the thrilling ritual .

RJ rattles the cup to his side while grumbling: "The popcorn’s stale again, Heather."

Verne approaches. “Could you stop with this garbage!? Why are you so OKAY with this? With them ?!”

“See I call this lil’ spectacle 'Monday Night Football'. They do stupid things, we watch. Simple.”

“I’m just with RJ,” Heather points. “Simple.”

Verne spanks his head hard and groans.

The moon flows peacefully by, and the sun follows through.

XXX

Hammy’s putting some real work into that second trash can, beside the one RJ monitors from the corner of a new brick house. Heather rummages through that one, and the three chill under the shadow of the roof hanging over the nearest edge of the backyard. At high noon, the sun rains its rays onto the land, washing over some energy and action for them to escape from, and cool their skin.

Heather stops rummaging and explains to RJ, “So liiike , we already did the whole stereotype thing, but we still gotta spice it up with some comedic interpretation .”

She dives into the crinkly pool and splashes her head out at the surface, a rotting banana peel on top. “So better knock it out sooner than later.” Thus, she performs the act, and messes the ground: “Oh, look at me! I’m eating all the trAsh ! ‘Cause I’m a trAAAsh-eater ‘n stuff! I’m a stinky-smelly-bitey-hissy- trAsh-drooler or whatever I am!”

They chuckle. Spying from the backyard, Verne motions to his team at the optimal opportunity. “Quick, they're having fun ! Now’s our chance!”

They take positions. Among the clutter, Ozzie - newly the target for them to shoot - wanders the front yard aimlessly. Sniffing flowers from bushes, picking a rose to twirl in his hand, sizing himself up with a garden gnome… in all this space, he’s still a lone man. 

“Make it subtle, everyone!” Verne reminds them.

Well, it’s what could very well be an entire fiesta they settle upon. Prodigal to the task, it certainly hooks in Ozzie’s attention to the house wall on the side, to the right, around a hexagonal, windowed protrusion of a corner. 5 giant golden balloons spelling out ‘OZNIE’ float in place for him to read. Verne and his team burst upon him in a spectacle of party sparklers, filling his pupils with stars. A festival made for him.

But yeah, they clearly only had 1 ‘Z’. Oznie (Ozzie), the front of his lips bulging out in speechlessness, frowns his eyes and moves right along to the flipside, to the backyard. The shade cannot save Verne once his smile melts down to his shoulders as a response.

Meanwhile, Heather jumps out of her can to RJ, the banana peel remaining clung on her head. She holds her arms up wide to the crowd of one. “Ta-daAaAaAa.” She leans in close and whispers, "But really though, I so don’t mind diggin' in this stuff."

RJ points at the peel. “What's the deal with the uh… lil’ parasite ya got there ? Taking it to dinner?”

"I'll keep it as a hat."

“Oh please don't.”

Ozzie passes them by in such an unusually mundane way that Heather feels obligated to address him. But the three of them watch for a moment as he trails past the patio to lose himself in the maze of shrubbery and ornaments that made up the yard.

“Yo dad, where’re you going ?” she asks.

As a homeless man he continues to wander past. “Nowhere particular, to be honest. Away from THEM, at least.”

They now lean around the corner of the house. Verne’s entire, sad failure of an operation becomes apparent to them. It also justified the random explosions of balloons they were hearing, as the porcupine kids stabbed themselves into them. They weren’t having fun doing it either. It looks like they’d just been grounded for a week… assuming Verne, Stella, Tiger, Lou, and Penny somehow grounded themselves too, considering their identical attitudes.

Honestly, if those giant balloons didn’t speak it loud enough, at least Hammy could save the other two the trouble: “Are they … trying to win Ozzie ?”

Ozzie’s off into the maze. But now, RJ takes some interest in Verne’s gameplan. Luckily for him, he has a natural advantage in swaying Ozzie. And she’s always at his side, banana-peel-hat or not.

“Heather!” he shouts. “Go say something to him!”

“Say what ? What am I supposed to say ?!”

“You can tell ‘em enough , at least! Tell ‘em about our wiener willow , tell ‘em how smelly Verne’s shell is on Wednesday mornings, WHO CAAARES ! JUST GET YOUR DAAAD … ON OUR SIIIIIDE . Before we’re 3-to-8- plus-one extra daddy ! Believe me, an extra daddy is a plus-one we DON’T need against us!”

“Wait a minute! Wait a minute. WAAAAAIT a MINUUUUTE !” Hammy pulls out a slightly -aged chocolate chip cookie from behind his back. “Let’s go back to that pet Jeffery idea from earlier.”

“Aha, thinkin’ like an entrepreneur again, I see.”

Heather swipes Jeffery and takes careful effort to analyze what she’s working with. “I’ll make some Jeffery merch.”

“Oh please do.”

They return to the site, where Ozzie roams. He passes Hammy at some sort of stand, who’s like a mascot for their new brand, wearing an entire Jeffery costume over his torso. The cookie suit is stitched professionally, not a homemade product, with a convincing level of ingenuity to exemplify the bustling nature of a market. However, that doesn’t mean his arms have much space to move, as the room for his elbows are obstructed by the costume, his arms out the sides stiffly, unable to bend.

In a hyper Boston accent (for some reason), he offers Ozzie a share in an open box of chocolate chip cookies they’ve stolen. “Freeeee samples! Getcha samples 'ere!”

“Ah!” Ozzie just takes a cookie and moves on without thought, and without a glance to initiate their exchange further. “You’re too kind, Hammy.”

"Aw c’mon maaan !"

Before he can take a bite, Heather thrusts herself into his face with all the Jeffery merchandise her arms could carry. '#Jeffery4Life' is plastered on the front of the little cap she wears with a brown brim, stitched in the design of a cookie. “Dad look, we custom-tailored this sick merch for only $5.99 on some sketchy website. We’ve got a buy-none-get-one-free operation goin’ on here.” She attempts to get an extra hat atop his head. “Oh look, you got one for free! Wanna try?”

"That is very nice, sweetheart. But I’ll pass."

“‘THAT’S NICE ’!?!” When he pays no attention, and carries on without a care, Heather has to overcome her speechlessness to yell out: “Dad, I made these… FREeEeEe … things with all the love $5.99 on some sketchy website can BUY! WITH… LOVE!”

Stella and Tiger are next on the marketing assembly belt Ozzie treads across. One leg kicked back behind her, Stella poses as a waiter along his path with a steaming cup in her hand. “‘Oh howdy sir, would you like some coffee?’”

Before he can react (by hurrying away), Tiger hooks him by the shoulder off the shores of personal indulgence he pursues alone. Just to his certain pleasure, he makes sure to speak with the dialect of a philosophical salesperson: “Ahhh Ozzie, my fellow intellectual, our life , our spirit , our reason … I don’t suppoooose you have just a minute ?”

" Noooot at the moment, no." Ozzie blocks him out, and picks up the pace.

Over at the TV set, he creaks open the lid of the blue cooler. He rubs a hand on his stomach before climbing inside for a snack. Arranged by the chilled drinks and perishables, a cat waited there. Tiger makes this moment his advent. Once every joint within Ozzie ceases to move, Tiger continues, romping as a rat in the fridge:

“BUT I think it would, eh… CONFORM to your sophisticated tastes to promenade a bit on the matter of our place in this world together, you and I. See, our common-ground lies in these words we speak, and I THINK it only stands to all sense of rationality that we work together, the two of us-”

Ozzie jumps out… blocks him out, and picks up the pace.

Stella still wobbles in her position at the main site, and abandons her act entirely when he intrudes. “Oz’. I’ve been standin’ like this for 10 minutes. Drink it so I can FEEL sumthin’.”

Alas , he decides to meditate, completing the ritual intensely on a tree branch in the air, cross-legged and hooked by the tail. Tiger rambles on philosophical speech again from beside him:

“What I’m saying is this… Mmmmm let me find the words … Life … Life is a symphony of choices . We choose every note we want to play. So let me inform you of the right key to play on - our key. At our side, you could sing the bright chorus of-”

Inside the fruit of his inner core, Ozzie screams as he tumbles down this endless pit of meaningless persuasion. His ears burn from the inside and out. Putting up with this no longer, he snaps his fingers, and the world flips. While he’d been hanging upside down by his tail the whole time, Tiger couldn’t be less fortunate. Gravity handles the rest.

Ozzie drops down to the ground as well and sprints away.

“Agh ,” Tiger yelps. “Ozzie, COME BAAAAACK!”

Stella’s stability begins to crumble like the shattering of a ceramic vase, her whole body shaking. “DRIN-K … THE DAAAAMN COFFEE, OZ’.”

He's off into the Hedge guarding any hope strongly against his beating heart to escape them. Through the suburbs, he runs right past a driveway where the Sniffer’s truck’s parked, the man himself advertising his newest brochure to a blonde-haired resident he’s seen before, Janise, on the walkway up to the door. A second later, a full tsunami of fur comes in a blur after Ozzie. 

Dwayne gets sidetracked, but acts too late, as the group of animals is already well gone down the sidewalk. “OH they insult me.”

Hoppy, brightly awake for the day, swings calmly on a large wooden seat hanging by glittering chains down from the roof of her elevated entrance balcony. Unfortunately, due to the ceiling overhead, Mr. Shady cannot join her on this midday excursion to the outside world. But y’know what, this is the life. The fences around the platform separate her from the vast scenery, and she enjoys the servings of the silver plate beside her in peace. Empty peace. In the shade, her white fur stands out. The brown settles in. 

But just then, some particularly wild activity gives her a source of entertainment to snack over, with her plate of grainy home-baked cookies. One gray creature leads the pack of those who chase after. The paws of the animals shower over the yard.

Right before this single bunny sticks a whole cookie in her mouth, Hammy steals it. “ Freeeee samples!” he advertises in his Boston accent. “Free samples…”

“ Hey !” Hoppy gasps in burning austerity. “ My oatmeal raisin-!”

The squirrel backpedals the whole distance and barfs the mess of a cookie back up onto the edge of her plate “ Oatmeal raisin ?! Maaaaaan…” He repels himself from the monster hosting the plague.

Harmless Hoppy stares at the saliva dripping off the cookie. Nervously, heartlessly laughing, she slowly and cautiously tips the plate just enough over the rim of the swing to splat the contaminated cookie onto the floor. A bird could hopefully take it off her hands, perhaps.

Ozzie scales the bricks of a full house wall and absolutely BARRELS himself down an open chimney up top. He bypasses an entire living room of humans, unable to fear the feeling of fear itself, and shoots into the bathroom upstairs. He jumps into the white tub at the end of the room and flicks the red curtains shut. To feign his activity, he switches the water on, but a jet of cold rain is what washes over his head. Sub-zero bullets penetrate his skin. At the edge of his sanity, his head twitches violently with the dreadfully cold water pounding onto his fur. 

The entrance of his daughter interrupts him.

Heather busts the bathroom door wide open and wanders over the fuzzy mat at the entrance. “Dad ! Dad where are you-?” RJ and Hammy follow behind her. She trips past them once smelling the muck of a wet opossum just behind the red shower curtain, and flinching back accordingly without a single glance in that direction. “ Oooooooooh god he’s in the shower isn’t he?”

“Why yes,” Ozzie informs them through an echoing tone so jocund. “That is me , bathing myself in some… some…” Of course, he has to try really hard to describe the freezing water in a way that doesn’t speak of the devil. “...REFRESHING STREAMS! Don’t come in if you’d rather not scar yourselves with my natural, nude form .”

“Can I-?” Hammy offers.

“Not yet …” rejects RJ, parading up to the curtain in bold strides over the cold tiles. “Wikipedia is my tome . In approximately 8.2 minutes, Grandpa here will HAVE to unveil his soaken bod to us, and when he does, we will all gaze upon the glorious artwork of nature as nature intended for us ! And of course if it takes longer, we’ll volunteer Heather to peek first.”

“I’m leaving …” she grunts.

RJ whips out a watch and counts the passing minutes. One. Then two. Three. Heather stands in the same place she started in.

“Leaving, were you?” RJ nudges. 

“ Well-ll … I think my nervous sweat glued me to the floor.”

“Hmm, turns out nature intends more for some than others .”

“Do you guys think I can count dad as a dependent?”

“I could be your dependent…” suggests Hammy. “ Spiritually …”

Four. Five. Counting is boring. Let’s just cut to the chase. The water keeps running. Ozzie keeps whistling away. RJ keeps losing patience.

A “Hey !” shoots through the curtain into Ozzie’s ear. He keeps his teeth gritted while the frozen water pelts his face, forcing a suffocative sensation onto him that needs manual breathing to remedy. As he searches for options, RJ goes on: “Grandpa! Las Vegas is out here drinkin’ its own PEE , and you can’t even take a shower in 8.2 MINUTES !? Some interest groups are gonna have a couple choice words for YOU!”

Light pours in over him. There’s a translucent window high on the back wall, and a small lock to go with it.

“Heather, are you okay-?” Hammy only gets to start.

“If you wanna come lick me dry, be my guest.” As if she’d been in the shower herself, and souring her face like an egg, Heather currently drips nervous sweat all across her body. She’s yet to move.

“I dunno if you’re kidding or not but I’d do anything for a friend-”

Their ears perk up at an unusual noise - one slippery swoosh from inside the shower. RJ and Hammy bop Heather forward against her will to volunteer her to peek inside. Scarring family images stay in the family. She draws back the edge of the curtain with incredible caution, but there's no one inside. At that, she rips it open, flabbergasted. Only running water, and the light coming through a rectangular frame high on the back wall. The outside world is completely audible to them.

A patch of grass in the backyard gets drenched by the time Ozzie and his soaken bod get down the wall. He lands as the kind of wet hairball that’d be clogged in the shower drain. Hands on his knees, he rests, even if only briefly.

In the midst of this jailbreak, the spotlight of Stella’s hollar rats him out: “Hey y'all, Oz’s back!”

He's back to the Hedge in a jiffy. Back past the Sniffer and his brochure again on the way. He leaves behind wet tire marks on the way, drizzling off his fur.

“Oop, back goooes the ‘possum!” Dwayne calls before he’s, yet again, left in the dust. Or the trail of watered ‘possum footprints, for that matter.

XXX

By the time another minute passed, Ozzie built himself a sturdy newspaper tent in the brush behind the site. There he shelters his cold, fragile self from the crowd, nowhere in sight. In this dark place, he crouches to the ground, utterly mortified, and wipes sweat (and chilling dampness) from his head. His breaths spare him no beat. Unfinished Sudoku puzzles surround him, gridded and numbers scattered, containing him within this archaic matrix. He’s completely relieved for one moment of silence. Hidden , but free.

Then a serial killer known as Hammy busts his head through the paper. “SUDOKU!!”

Ozzie dies instantaneously. Everyone from both groups stalks his tent right outside, and react to the wailing fall.

“ III forgot who this was …” Hammy’s back half speaks.

“All I WANT…” Ozzie grumbles from inside the tent. “...is a feast … of silen-”

RJ and Verne already stance up into a position able to sprint up the Himalayas at a moment’s notice. “Quick, he wants a FEAST-!”

“NO no no. Just silence…” At last, he desperately plays a card for lonesome: “Why don’t you… such a… FFFIIIINE family you are… busy yourselves with keeping to fill up the cave, with luscious delights? MMM! I can imagine it already! Something for the good of everyone.”

“Quick, we gotta impress him with our CAVE-FILLING SKILLS!”

They’re gone.

“I- At least it’s something productive .”

XXX

The sun and moon have to push against the sky to force the other through the cycle again.

XXX

Early morning comes again to announce their heated struggle in a fanfare. Tiger’s taken post at the dead end of a nameless street in front of the Hedge. Encompassing the extent of his keen focus, a single car rolls away from him, back turned as it rides up the road. Then a handful of movements flash through the black trunk window, no matter how vague they are. His sharp pupils train themselves to be a deadeye, and track the textures of the moving parts. The flickering of furry tails ? 

The trunk door begins to haul itself open, and there they are. The enemies, RJ and his accomplices, prepare to escape with armfuls of groceries they’ve removed from plastic bags, while the oblivious driver must’ve never batted an eye.

“ALERT, they are in a trunk !” he gasps into a walkie-talkie, biting nails. “PILLAGING it’s cargo for the cave ! And, and… why, they’ve uncovered enough coffee creamer for Ozzie to DIE over!”

Stella stays on the line with him in the corner of an open garage while Verne and the porcupine couple busy themselves with the task. They run wild around the dusty place, picking out sports drinks and more from a dirty white shelf. Too busy to assist, she says, “Hurry man, you gotta take those suckas out !”

“But howww ?” he ponders.

The porcupine kids bounce through the Hedge to meet him. “Maybe we can help!”

In a mere second, a two-lane track was assembled. Tiger’s paws use the seats of toy cars as rollerskates, and the play track aims him right down the yellow dashes marking the middle of the road. The kids ride atop his curving back.

“Ready to disobey the speed limit , Uncle-in-law Tiger?” asks Spike.

“LAUNCH me!”

The remote Spike’s holding gets left behind as soon as he presses its button. The orange speed pads of the track motorize the toy cars and shoot them down the street at the SUV. Speeding up to the rear of the car, the kids bounce off his back and into the trunk as their momentum starts to fade.

Every glance from Team RPS around the plentiful trunk gives them the feeling that their bounty’s getting a little less plentiful . RJ identifies a bag one second, and a fresh empty space the next. No specs of dust fill these holes that appear, while their loot disappears. And before they know it, the WHOLE trunk is stolen off their hands, and the 3 kids are back in the Hedge with the gold.

The others have finished too, so the entirety of Team Oak assembles for a progress check.

“Woah,” Lou breathes once the kids place it all down back in the forest. What RJ intended to steal fell upon their hands, and the size of the bundle surely said some things about his superior tactics. “ That’s a lot.”

Verne pumps a fist. “Another score for Team Oak .”

“Boy will Oz’ be impressed ,” Stella agrees.

RJ stances himself and places his foot down on the edge of the trunk back in the suburbs. “Oh-ho, they think THAT’S gonna impress ‘Oz?”

“Huh, what’s his favorite coffee creamer?” further puzzles Hammy.

“Watch us top it,” Heather asserts.

Team RPS take their leave from the SUV and resort to more creative methods in the closest vicinity. Hammy headbutts himself into a house’s doorbell. A human answers, and spends the next good minute locating the greeter. When it’s a squirrel on the welcome rug, the man starts ‘awww’-ing away while Hammy itches at his neck with a foot. RJ and Heather anticipate this response and slip inside the house, clung to the wall. They exit the same way, only now carrying another pack of loot to compensate for their losses.

Through this tactic alone, they make a whole pinball game out of the street. At the cave, they slam down boxes over and over that put Verne to shame. Team Oak just watches with gaping mouths, while Heather holds her phone high and lets it blast music out to keep up their rhythm, and energize their action.

So for once, Verne's group now lift the stones of this burden onto their shoulders, storing the collective accumulation of food in the cave. Had they let it be, and tamed the heisting beast within RJ, they could’ve lowered the load by a fortune . Instead, they’re aching head-to-toe. Nearly triple the numbers, and at last losing once .

Ms. Wright bears her own burden to scrub off her working space as the street gets swept clean by the repeated attacks instituted by that same basket of animals, stealing a WEEK’S worth of their typical claims under one hour . The phone on the corner of her desk inside her room rattles off its rocker with the complaints of the town. Eventually, it slips over the edge, only the cable keeping it from crashing onto the spotless floor. Her fingers, stabbing at the keys of her laptop, enter a fury. Her lips, and whole countenance, does not. 

RJ and Heather waltz their way out a front door, away from the screeching bat-like ambiance coming from inside a singular house in particular. The resounding drill of hard metal from that dark, loud, rowdy place makes the outside air a welcoming adjustment to Heather.  

“Jeez, that place was givin’ me a bad case of the spooks .” It’s only now she notices the whole pound of edgy makeup and dozen silver necklaces she’s got on. “Woah woah, how’d this happen?!”

“Expectations.”

“GUYS! GUYS! GALS! GALS!” Hammy sprints up to them.

Heather shimmies off her expectations.

“ Ozzie’s awake .”

They’re gone. RJ tackles both of them into his armpits like footballs and travels at the speed of light to go for a touchdown through the Hedge, blazing tracks of footprints along the way. Still, he carries enough standards as well to make sure he plays a round of hopscotch 2 kids draw on the sidewalk. He treads into a net trap set up down the lane, tied from the gallow of a nearby tree by the Sniffer to demonstrate to the woman while STILL attempting to persuade her, night and day. RJ busts through the net’s strings without effort.

Dwayne shrugs his sagging shoulders. “Do I even have to say anything, or am I just embarrassing myself?”

“Yeah, I’m not buying,” Janise, at last, after a whole day, decides.

Of course, Team Oak already set up signs, balloons, and everything greeting Ozzie’s late rise, stiffly crowded to smile obnoxiously as he yawns and trudges around the lake from the willow. As he figures out how to maneuver the bright setting, they wait. Something comparable to a Thanksgiving feast stacked up behind Verne and his group awaits the guy.

They prep their voices for a choir: “ GOOOOOOOOOOD MOR-NING-!”

RJ, burning alive in his own motive, plows through Ozzie and steals him to be seated aggressively at the cushion lounge. The 3 of them - RJ, Heather, and Hammy - go in a flurry to offer him luxuries from the site.

“YOU HUNGRY?!”

“WANT YOUR OLD DUDE COFFEE, DAD?!”

“ARE YOUR TOOTSIES COLD?!”

Team Oak seizes him by his arm away from the trio. Team RPS gasps and grabs his other. Suddenly, the flame of division crackles underneath him, ready to roast. This pack of maniacal monkeys jerks him back and forth while he claws at the dirt with his toes to remain grounded in this treacherous predicament. The apes never cease.

“WE’VE GOT ALL THE COFFEE CREAM’UH…” Stella strains. “...YOU’LL EVER NEED.”

“JUST… PICK A SIDE ALREADY!” Verne booms. “This is so TIRING! EGH!!”

They’ve objectified him as some kind of dog toy. How disgraceful. They can’t seem to tell when they’ve tugged him past his brink. He sees it in their eyes, and growling teeth. If neither could paint him in the background of the canvas, behind this treachery, he’d remove himself from the scene altogether.

His feet cling into the earth, but the space between them worsens. Stretched to the brink, he glances down behind his gaping legs. He gets his tail to thwap Verne's hand off his right and digs his (relatively) harmless claws into the raccoon's hand, currently melting it into putty, and forces it away from the left.

There’s quiet, for a single blip of time.

Ozzie quickly runs off past the lake and conceals himself inside a quieter room of vegetation. 

Heather glances at the others, all eyeing her, and goes after him.

Nothing comes back around the bush in front of them for minutes. RJ’s so in shock he forgets to check his watch.

Until Heather does return again, and pitter-patters with a letter in her hands. “Hey. Ya girl’s back.” 

They acknowledge her existence through awkward silence. It’s not often she comes as such a lone figure among the rest.

“So lemme just open this letter real quick, uh…” Yes, she’s a lone gray figure showing herself to the awaiting crowd, just as lone in the delivery of her message. “’K, alright, drum roll please! Dad says he iiiiis …” She reads straight from the slip of paper inside the envelope: “' Unaffiliated. It is babyish and creates too much stress for an issue that needs a rational solution. I've never felt so un-dramatic in my LLLLIFE. Sorry, that was a bit dramatic. Written with feigned love and dwindling hope, Ozzie.'”

Everyone leans past the bush Heather had emerged beside and makes out Ozzie through the leaves. Though he's found nowhere on ground level . He slouched his stomach over a branch up in a high tree overlooking the back end of the TV set. He flicks through channels, drowsy and eyes red (what’s left open, at least), in hopes of drowning his brain in the vague colors and shapes on the box he could barely identify.

The gate to this city locked shut. No one could capture it or its people.

“So Ozzie's off the table isn't he?” Verne puffs.

“He was right about the 'stress' part…” RJ admits. Then he adopts a springy attitude to digress this stressful tension flicked with his back to the group. “Welp! We're getting chips to ease ourselves!”

"Yeah," nods Verne. "Us too."

Everyone but Ozzie follows RJ along.

"No."

"Yes."

"No!"

"Yes!"

"My solution's rational!"

"MY solution's more rational!"

SOMEHOW, though, when the time comes, RJ hoists with both hands a dollar bill up to the glass of the vending machine, and can’t quite keep his eyebrows straight. But he just stares at it. Heather watches him tilt it at all angles underneath the crooked light in the ceiling. The treeline from the densest, most uncertain forest depths staggers low shadows over them, stripes and spots tangled up in a wire. The reflection of the bill off the shiny window screen just can’t seem to line up into a rectangle. RJ snaps to Heather, and she brings out the untouched paint roller peeking out of the golf bag on the floor. He flicks his head toward her in such simple gratitude as he gently applies pressure from the roller against the crinkled surface of the dollar. 

What amicable approach he gave didn’t foretell the rubbing up and ripping down of his actual practice. He flattens that dough so vigorously. He flattens it with such arduous vehemence involved, smoke flees from the edges of the paper. That’s what it takes to have every wrinkle come smooth. Every corner. RJ peels the bill like a poster from the wall, leaving a dead, burnt imprint on the glass. Hurrah! There’s a solid 90 degrees on every angle. 

“The perfect dollar…” Heather gasps.

RJ plants a tender kiss on the center of the paper. “This one's for you, Mr. Washington…”

The big man on the dollar holds his signature Washington Smile - that is, no different from his signature Washington Straight Face. “Make our nation proud , son.”

“I’ve got a patty for these buns, your patriot-ness.” He stretches both corners out as precisely as possible to slip it in.

The machine inserts the bill into itself.

It develops such a deep, personal connection to the thing, and gets to really know its ins and outs.

If vending machines do have noses, this one wasn’t gonna stop until it sniffed down the whole thing. Y’know, REALLY enjoying itself with that particular dollar.

Already, RJ can’t bear the wait. He stabs his teeth into his lip. His hands shake and plead so slightly as a beggar. He stares down the single bag of Snazzy Ranch chips - the only snack left in the display. Already, RJ’s mouth wets itself over the thought.

ERR.

The vending machine spits the dollar out. 

RJ’s bones crumble from the inside, his knees shattering from such a deficit. “Oh no no no…” He demands divine guidance: “Is THIS what capitalism FEELS LIKE!? Having SO many opportunities but no means of USING THEM!?”

Verne doesn’t care to deposit his leftovers anywhere but where’s most convenient behind him, even if it means RJ’s head. Little Nacho Cheese gremlins take to their ritual dance at the cheesy-toed foot of Verne’s crinkly, half-air-filled pile of material taste-bud satisfaction. He and his team crunch all the worries of life and of Ozzie away, and absolutely smother their faces with orange powder that tints their skin. They were sliding through the stuff. Turning the desolate overhang into something of a feudal establishment, though it’s pretty clear anyone would say there’s a clear imbalance in the noble:peasant ratio.

“Well this is just stupid.” RJ rips the empty bag off his head.

Heather is quick to provide him solace; crouching to meet his dismantled posture, she zips up and pats his back gently, the other hand resting around him with the care of a mother. “There there , RJ. Like, sometimes in life, you’re just gonna meet guys who wanna spit in your face ‘n snort nacho cheese dust. But I’m always here, RJ.”

He doesn’t address her. Instead, he smashes his forehead on the glass. 

Soon he opens his eyes again, and off the reflection of the surface he makes out a vague shape: a bear’s studded cave.

XXX

RJ’s immediate action call took Heather a chip-bag’s worth of energy just to process in a mindless flail after him on his unbreakable trajectory. Running into the tunnel of the cave, Heather does her best to keep up with him as he blazes through the mouth of deepening strife. “RJ, are you sure this is a good idea -?!”

“Mmmmm, aw MAN, y’know, I’m feelin’ miiiighty stressed right about now! How ‘bout we make a lil’ deposit from the bank ‘n JUST MAYBE show that shell-hog who’s boss. Y’know what I’m sayin’?!”

They enter the dark back tunnel. “ Why ?” she asks.

“All this food is what WE rightfully stole!” RJ spits back. “Er, half of it. So let's just get ourselves a lil' loan here ‘n there 'n show that guy WHAT we're made of! Turns out we DON’T need your extra daddy to win! We just NEED MORE FUNDS!”

" Fiiine , maybe ONE bit ."

Turns out, half of what they find had been depleted already. Sorta . They yank back the curtain into the backroom, and to them, a hairy culprit exposes himself in a crime they didn’t even know could be committed. It’s true, what he did is unspeakable, and it’d sure take a lot more than the fifth amendment to justify the massive lumps in Hammy’s cheeks. By the box and by the box, RJ holds his breath to the point of fainting at the Milk Dud hoarding going on during their attempted leisure.

He slaps his hands onto the sides of his dome. “MY MILK DUDS!!”

“Oh ssssssnickerdoodle,” Heather exclaims, “SPIT THOSE OUT HAMMY!”

Spitting them out, gushing those caramel-filled pebbles, onto the faces of RJ and Heather takes a good minute.

“Aw yeah,” he grunts through his cheeks. “Almost finished.”

Yes, he finishes.

“ Ahhhhh …”

XXX

At the home site, RJ drops a single box of Milk Duds, taped back shut, into the faintly-tinted grass just off of the rich, fertile soil of the pond. This locale makes a fine point to construct a profitable future, doesn’t it? The waters of a promising background seep through the dirt and moisten all the claimable land and capital below their paws.

“And so, beneath the suaaave and STUNNING lead of myself, along with this mere profit , we build the foundation of a THRRRIVING capital!”

A hundred other ‘mere profits’ spill out into a bank of gold bars at their base.

“I dunno dude,” Heather admits at their, admittedly, questionable jumpstart funding. “This still doesn't feel right to do… ”

"Do you think Verne'll notice?" Hammy whispers. 

But when they see Verne and his team doing the exact same thing at the Log with all the Nacho Cheese they’d won from the vending machine, doubt bids farewell. Oh, Verne noticed. And RJ did as well. There’s no way the turtle must’ve ever thought of storing those bags away. With Ozzie uninvolved, who was left to be the point of competition but each other? Both RJ and Verne go blank, matching their views as they’ve matched their new investments, mouths hanging open, silent.

Stella starts to tell Verne, “Well THIS is, uh… REALLY SOMETHIN’.”

Both Heather and Hammy can't help but mutter, "Y'know, this suddenly feels way more right."

Entire stolen mailboxes get staked into the ground at the base of their new respective piles - blue and red. Their neighboring addresses scream their swears across the site, where a vacant lounge rests between.

RJ pitches a megaphone again - seemingly his go-to when addressing his opposers. “ Behold , croutons, this is now Romeo and Juliet without Romeo and without Juliet . In other words, no tragic lovers with possible gnome-sonas . Instead, we are JUST angry. GRRRRR .”

Hammy presents a small vial to him. “I've got the hemlock ready just in case you wanna roleplay.”

"Hammy, that’s apple juice."

“I know! Poison that tastes great is EVEN BETTER !” He pours its diabolical contents into his mouth.

Among the dead silence lingering between in the impassable moat of the site, RJ’s voice travels to Verne’s end. “ALRIGHT LADIES! Who's up to kiss the apple juice off his lips?!”

“ Nooo ,” everyone groans.

Hammy himself jumps at the offer, though. “ME !! Wait, I’m me.”

Stella yells out, “You can kiss some apple juice OFF MY STRIPED , STINKIN’-”

“Dad drooling over Shakespeare was tragic enough ,” Heather snarks. “Do you guys really have to?”

The ring of a doorbell, from deep in the core of the suburbs, resounds over the entire earth. It strays the tips of the grass towards the source, and alightens the whole town. Stella’s ears alight just the same. "Pizza delivery!" she calls. 

“What?” Verne blurts back.

“There’s a pizza delivery, 4 blocks away!”

“Well RUN !! GO !!” Competition ensues again. Team Oak clutters together at his command. He throws one last comment at RJ in particular: “Let’s hope it’s still warm and has only a PROPER sauce-to-cheese ratio!”

“Man oh man, he will never stop dissing my slightly-cheese-favored preference,” RJ sighs. He joins Heather in position to hunt Verne down in hot pursuit. “Hammy, you’re holding down the fort while we’re gone-!”

"Done."

Every single box of Milk Duds already takes the formation of fortress wall foundations framing their perimeter. He’s stacked them all around, complete with an arched doorway on one side. He hugs its surface, though his small wingspan only takes him so far down a wall length. RJ and Heather let the winds respond to this immediate action while they stand there in the dead center of the area.

“That’s not what I-” RJ brushes these doubts away. “Y’know what, you’ve got the spirit. CHEESE HO-OOO!”

The two jump over the walls and follow into the Hedge, and Hammy squeezes the fort down to the best of his ability.

XXX

The whole day passes in quite a comparable manner. It’s as forecasted as a weather report… assuming the inconsistent weatherman gibberish gets filtered out of the actual reality of the skies. RJ and Verne keep returning with their own scores of food to seclude themselves in their own piles of processed goods. As the sun trails through the sky, it deposits the remnants of frivolities into two mounds of their minor leisures, climbing to space in compilations of dreaded conflict.

Hammy’s literal sense of comprehension later inspired the evolution of these junk-yards into compactly-built fortresses for both leaders to claim dominion. They’re constructed with great sturdiness and color, flashing the reds of soup cans and yellows of bargained boxes. In each piece of cardboard and metal, there’s kept inside a single serving of angered tenacity, but also a few grams of trepidation, waiting for the opposing team to just make one score that raises their fort to the heavens. Both forts host a flat roof for utility as a battlement, and four pillars hold the corners together like castle walls. Boxes become buildings, and buildings become cities, founded by the investments compounded from the labors of the workers at their command. More boxes. The food tucked inside sees less use than the containers themselves . If anything, they add more weight, and more mass, to reduce the permeability of the buildings, especially of the outer walls surrounding both territories. 

Such metropolis could’ve been used to fill Vincent’s cave ten times over, but instead went to the construction of these bestial things.

XXX

When it comes time to take leave for the night, the sun stubbornly insists on being the only celestial object over the land. The moon has to thrust it out of the way to commence. 

Even at these dim hours, it goes on. And this clashing of paw-to-scale takes to the suburbs in between each addition to the height of the fortresses. The animals ravage two creaky neighboring houses, both claiming the single bush RJ and Verne fight in from the front yard, and leave in a dying slog.

Two old men - with suits of red and blue respectively - exit after discovering what hideous acts were underway. They badger their words and strangle them tightly around the other’s throat immediately and without a second thought. RJ and Verne put on a similar performance, jabbing their hands into faces and rustling the leaves of the spiny bush, while their workers drag themselves away.

"Damn you, Mr. Blutarch!” the red-suited man swears. “Why must I stare at that hideous shack you call a house every time I step out the DOOR!?"

"You’re a filthy wretch , Mr. Redmond! And you’ve certainly rubbed that filth off on your garbage dump of a household YOURSELF!"

XXX

Just as the moon came in, the sun thrusts it out right back.

Now, the next morning, RJ feels his own temptations tempted long enough. On top of that, he shares one mind with the preexisting food stash packed together at the group’s site, left in unclaimed land between the forts of both teams. He senses its insecurity there. So he lifts a leg up, and begins to climb. He scales the reds of soup cans and yellows of bargained boxes. He scales all of Mt. Feeds-a-Lot, and reaches the heights of twisted trees. Metals crinkle and clank under his feet. Then, he removes the Spuddies can, which acted as a flag on the very top.

It's like he took the jem off the pedestal. Right when he whistles himself away, Verne comes to scavenge his own share from the bottom of the mountain, coughing and ensuring the secrecy of his shifty act. The smell of a raccoon’s fur remains clouding the stash, and soon, a turtle’s scales join it.

“This is your 3rd loan today,” Heather frowns at RJ in the backroom of the bank cave. She sits behind a cardboard desk composed of disassembled snack boxes, guarding the stash of consumable wealth locked up from their efforts on the previous days.

Vincent’s cave sure did make the perfect place for double-dipping on a commitment. Stocking it chock-full of goodies now behind Heather and her desk, in that vault, only to withdraw the fruit basket of these efforts at a moment’s notice. RJ takes one stick after another out of the tower, and more falls into his hands. Right now, they’re empty. But they long for more.

“I know ,” RJ reiterates. “But between you 'n me, I'm kinda in a tough spot here, y'know, a 'pickle', if you please…”

That’s not to say he doesn’t already have a big stack of stuff at the curtain entrance.

"... psychologically speaking," he finishes. 

"I’ll say."

Outside of RJ’s knowledge, the porcupine kids are busy vacuuming up the rest of the food on Mt. Feeds-a-Lot beside the Log, under Verne’s supervision. As the mountain gets smaller, their bags only grow larger.

“They're 965 steps away.” Verne keeps watch over the competitors from afar, aided by binoculars. By the time they arrived, it’d be far too late to conceal their act. Luckily, the whole length of the Hedge remains between them. RJ and his two associates march down on a promenade, and have their images fester stronger still in the lenses. “964 steps. 963. 962-”

“They ain't hosey-mosey-ing down here,” Stella snorts. “C'mon, they step faster than that .”

"Mammoth steps, Stella."

"How do you know how big mammoth steps are-?"

"SHH. I’m old."

The vacuum hoses of the kids suck up the pile of food layer by layer. Eventually, the giant bags in the back explode open and pour the food out into a mound not too much different from what they started with. In fact, it only produced more of a mess. The boxes, cans, and bottles now made themselves into some rainbow godzilla vomit instead of a rainbow mountain (still just as colorful, but far less appealing to look at).

Tiger is the first to panic. He unwinds the rabid doll having a spasm inside his head, and calmly paces up to Stella. Then, he very limpidly taps her on the shoulder to usher her attention.

So Stella turns around and, at the disaster, blasts her palm out as a reflex and thrusts it into the side of Tiger's head, knocking him to the ground.

“OW!”

Verne turns around and, before he can barf the same reaction onto Stella, she feels it very fitting to clobber him in the face as well.

" Ow… "

Stella hurries over to assist the porcupines while the other two are crippled on the floor. “How many steps, Verne?”

"9…50. 949. 948…"

“Let’s clean it up before that fat mammoth gets here!” she calls.

Verne sits up and watches them all bend their backs and straighten their arms to pick up each item one-by-one and transfer them to the mass of their fort. With what RJ was compiling, he likely wouldn’t even notice this long-kept bundle disappear from his greedy eyes. Verne grips his fingers tightly. “Keep up the wooork …”

When once again departing on a new mission, RJ reads over the profiles he wrote of his team on the posters, scribbling additional notes. “Gotta max out business…”

The supply of the food in the backroom of the cave starts to go dry that day, leaving it exactly how RJ found it at the start of the month - full of dusty junk and reeking of bear grease.

Verne checks his profiles in the same way. “ More efficiency…”

What remains of Mt. Feeds-a-Lot comes down too.

“And more results!” they proclaim simultaneously.

One inch. RJ adds it. Verne adds two to his fort. Every two Verne adds, RJ raises his by three. While much of the site goes lax, their labors never do. The state of this place returns to more of a degraded version of their primitive lifestyle. Outside the fortress walls secluding their motivations, trees only crowd the forest floor, and mud moistens under the shade. It’s like reverting a whole year’s worth of progress and transmuting it into one day - condensing smoke into brick, weighing down the earth at only two distinct locations of value, leaving the rest to be dead and unfertilized.

Team Oak prances the long road up to the entrance of Vincent’s cave, through a long, wet cavern and then the exterior staircase leading to the platform of the cliff. "I'm a turtle !” Verne hustles his marching deadbeats. “You're better than this ! High knees, high knees!”

Spike collapses on the stone-carved stairs right then. “We… HAAAAVE none .”

"Our legs are shaped like marshmallows , Uncle Verne," Bucky tells him.

"But brown and filled with toothpicks," groans Quillo. 

They extract their share from the cave and group at the bottom. The porcupines have their backs loaded with heavy goods like a ball and chain, and can barely walk. Unlike most cats, and under most circumstances, Tiger can’t even land on his feet , making his back suffice when falling onto the ground behind them. One big bruise is left on his cheek, courtesy of Stella punching him to the ground earlier.

Millions more idle complaints scrunch the ridges of Verne’s face. They orchestrate their talks of boredom, and great strain, behind his back. His neck tingles more than his tail. “Hey, I’d bet you RJ’s off in his little scheming corner , scheming up ways to burn you out . Who knows! He could’ve poisoned you all with those jelly donuts you ate this morning. I always say: If it’s too much sugar, it’s too sweet to be true.”

“Ah,” Tiger intervenes while currently upside-down. “I am gracious that you have provided me with an EXCUSE for feeling like a jelly donut.”

Behind the masks of their exhaustion, the paper burnt out and away, Verne scans the loyalty and intent kept held in their eyes. He tenses his lips, and flashes the Log back through his mind. Seemingly, they know their place well - his team. They’re at his side, and the Log’s, and deep within their hearts, there’s one label they share. “ Come on , guys… we’ve got foraging to do.” He reiterates this in a plea: “ We . Are . Foragers .”

Inside an empty kitchen, RJ has Heather gather pantries full of cans from the shelf of a tall cabinet spanning from floor to roof. “C'mon! Work that tail, work that tail!” he pounds at her.

By the end of it, when she hops all the way down, her tail goes completely limp in her arms like its muscles were removed entirely, becoming just a wet noodle behind her. Her shoulders are only so broad to carry a load like this. Absolutely drained throughout her whole body, she sighs, and goes to consult a pen pal by sitting back against a pale vase on the floor and pulling out a letter and pen. There she writes:

‘Dear pen pal,

Remind me to slap RJ later. Y'know, once I can actually move my tail again.'

She tosses the written letter behind her and over the wilting plant of the pot. Hammy receives it on the other side. He gets his own letter and writes only the following:

‘Dear pen pal,

I think I need a nap.’

He throws it back over to his pen pal. Heather receives it, and the snoring she hears immediately afterward prompts an eyebrow raise. HAMMY of all people is the one to collapse from exhaustion on the other side of the vase. Heather goes to pick him up and carry him out of the house herself.

Out there - out under the blinding, burning sun - RJ’s watch scolds him. Their efficiency has proven worthless, for what they’ve compiled pales in comparison to the full lap the minute hand made. “They chugged the VERY last sports drink in the cooler!” he grunts, only intended for himself. “They should be more needlessly hyped up than Nascar fans . What am I still MISSING?!”

“Honestly…” Heather’s spine fails her, breaking the rhythm of her body, throwing every step off-beat with Hammy napping in her arms. She nearly crumbles behind RJ, in the sandstorm sweeping her away from his concern. “Gotta say… I think a nice, unstressful break would help.”

Her comment clogs up his brain with its own dune, and aches him immensely. “AGH ! If we so much as tiptoe our teeny, cutesy paws back a bit-”

“-he’s gonna pull a mach 5 like it’s the Indy 500!” Verne tells his group at the foot of the cliff.

"But!..." RJ admits it: "You’ve tempted me."

Verne fiddles with his fingers. "I guess, maybe just, ehHhH hhh …-"

"-One day?"

"-...wouldn’t hurt ?"

Heather flings Hammy out of her arms and throws them up to the sky. Tiger suddenly returns to his feet, flipping rightside up. With the opportunity, the stars realign again. They inhabit their forest site together, at once, as a family .

Despite their pause, each day of this week continues to glare hotter against their skin like a combusting furnace. Relaxing is what both teams do, or at least attempt to do so, but insist to remain on their own land. The food forts stand strong, and pillar the site. They remain within the outer boundaries - walls, stacked around the premises of the bases, that block the sun from their view. They refuse to let its rays scald them in even a glimpse of peacetime. Some clink glass cups together. Others wade into kiddie pools, inflated and bursting with pink. This leisure comes under one umbrella, which also happens to separate them from each other: resting behind walls, and away from the so-called enemy.

However, RJ secretly assigns Hammy to a “super special quest” making use of these stale hours. He points him out the entrance gate and at Verne’s fort - completely identical in size at this moment in time, but shaped more rigidly and compactly. Inside, the Log is concealed, kept only for Verne himself to hold control of this relic. RJ’s borders the lake, and the willow tree, keeping a keen eye over the rest of this space, and the gateway to the TV set beyond.

RJ enters back into the central tower of his food fort. He sighs, and bends his knees down at something hanging high on the back wall, which is composed completely of cardboard snack boxes. He prays to a chocolate chip cookie, aging but forever young, preserved and glued onto a blank frame at this altar. “Oh gracious Jeffery, I ask you for your strength… Shower upon my handsome face the riches of corporate fortune.”

Hammy joins on his knees. “I will pray with you.”

"You’re supposed to be spying on Verne."

"God comes first ."

"No. Shut up. Go."

The porcupine kids laze about on the flat roof and fling their independent yo-yo’s around. As the watchmen of Verne’s fort, they can’t escape the hot, midday air putting a burning gleam over even the dullest of cereal box surfaces. Bucky, of the 3, notices a certain squirrel sneaking through the perimeter of the land.

" Heyyy ! They’re spying on us!" Bucky tattles.

"WHAT?"

They zip to the edge of the short, castle-like wall and track Hammy, maneuvering himself around, leaning way too far into the whole tip-toeing bit. He whispers each step he takes with a toe. It doesn’t do much to drape the cover of the leaves further over him, but at least he’s got the spirit.

“Alright, ready to roll!” Quillo drags over Hercules’ own hero-sized banana cream pie, with Bucky’s help.

Spike looks ready to slap them both. “We’re not supposed to attack THEM , STOOPID! Uncle Verne said it ! ‘We’re ONLY fighting for the Log . RJ not included, as much as I wanna clobber him in the face.’ He SAID it!”

“Yeah-uh, but who said we’re aTtAcKiNg ? Sounds more like a prank to me,” Bucky snarks.

“Sorry girls, but the ‘troll-train’ has entered the station . Leave it to the men here,” Quillo insists.

Hammy gives a smile and 2 thumbs up aside Verne’s fort, safe and sound. A barrage of banana cream pies bombs him from above. The kids laugh and snort like crows at their posts.

He gives their war crimes no chance to slip his mind. Hammy returns to RJ’s fort, absolutely submerged in fluffy white, and flaps out a sheet of blank paper in front of him. Eye twitching, Hammy unloads a giant cream pie - an eye for an eye - and chucks it down into the paper, wiped from existence. It disappears into the letter, contained as a special package for a special someone . Vindictive, he folds it up into an airplane in a second and propels it forth over the fort walls.

The plane loops through the air before dive-bombing into the mailbox of Verne’s fort. The pointed tip stabs Verne in the back of the head inside the walls, on the receiving end of the hollow box. He takes it.

" Oh brother…"

Indifferently to the delivery, he unfolds it crease by crease until the paper is stretched flat in front of his face. In a second, a giant cream pie flies out of the blank letter onto him, not budging him an inch.

So already this day of ‘rest’ appears to be short-lived. Hammy’s pie strike on Verne prompted some new alertness in his agenda. He carefully observes every inch of the food city they’ve built, and calculates its size relative to RJ’s. Stella and Tiger follow his lead regardless of their break time - the latter only for the sake of the former. Verne has them continue to reinforce the structure of the main fortress, transferring some smaller structures over to amass an impregnable tower RJ could only scheme of. It gains warmongering capabilities.

RJ had barrels of Ultra Mega Cheese Balls delivered by a truck to his mailbox in droves for him to stack up into an unbeatable tower on the roof of his fortress, much higher than Verne’s. It irked the turtle.

Any opposition to the next fated meeting crumbled underneath the height of the single-stacked, swaying towers constructed atop the forts, breaking out of the treeline and into the atmosphere. From their peak, any jump would be deadly . If they collapsed, it’d certainly mean catastrophic damage to the food towns below. They stand tall instead. A can of Spuddies, once marking the top of Mt. Feeds-a-Lot, a relic of the past, flags the top of RJ’s tower, as if he’d stolen the whole mountain and its glory itself. Verne’s fort boxed off the Log, controlling the centerpiece of their entire civilization. Verne’s concern over this fight was flawed - refusing to fight , on the rowdy side of the coin. RJ’s logic was flawed on the other - fighting for peace and abstinence from conflict.

But in the end, the brewing tides of war were inevitable.

On the top platform of the fort, Stella watches Verne burn his eyes out while he stares forward painfully. “Well? Somethin' good catch yuh eye?”

“Shh, it's a staring contest, Stella. My entire day's worth of ego is on the line.”

On the other fort, RJ lets his eyes pop out of his head before he dares to blink, but stalls his thoughts in the tension.

“So you’re done backin’ outta this?” Stella confirms to Verne. “We’re gonna have tuh fight some fat sandwich-snobbin’ truck drivers in the end anyway. Why be so scared to fight now ? I’ll admit, some silly staring contest is a bit soft , dontcha think? What’s it gonna solve ?”

“Just… keep… patience,” Verne slips out his teeth. “Once THEY strike first, we can take their fort out, act all repentant later, and pin all the blame on them in the end.”

“Y’know, I coulda sworn we had the day off ,” Lou thinks aloud.

Hammy shunts RJ out of the way and stares down Verne without effort, unmoving and relaxed as a couch pillow. The dumb grin he wears sends the veins in Verne's eyes bulging with red. And he never blinks.

But Verne finally does.

“Aw c'mon that's cheating !” he shouts. “He can blink so fast we can't even tell WHEN he does it. Can we get a coach on this? ANYONE?”

RJ flattens his dull speech to a monotone: “I pick fantasy football teams better than you. Get over it.”

Verne feels his eye twitch, and they remain at a standstill for a while.

The good ol’ megaphone comes out in RJ’s hand again. “Hey Veeeerne ,” he drawls, listless and sour. “How many days left ‘til winteeeerrrr ?”

“RJ, I will POKE your eyeballs out-!” But then again, the mention forces him to compute the math, only to satisfy his own urges. “Wait now that you say it , that would beeee two hundred twenty-”

A stream of water squirts over his face from a water gun, sniping him from the distance between the forts. Heather and Hammy crack up quite literally, restraining the yolk of their laughter from spilling.

“YOU COUNT SLOOOOW!” RJ sends over. “Here's an easy one: How many days ya got 'til I kick your big BE-hind?”

“Uhh, zero ?”

“Great job, Verne! YOU get a Jolly Rancher.”

He passes one over. Verne stares at it in his hands and grins like a kid. “Oh, thanks-” Another squirt comes upon him again.

“GUL-LIBILITYYYY !! When'd that shell get so SOFT, huh?”

Verne takes these incessant shenanigans no longer, and finally heaves out the order: “ FIRRRREEEE !!”

RJ turns to Heather. “See what'd I say, ‘Miss Pacifist’ over here? We’re not fighting if THEY strike first. Now we can take their WHOLE FORT down, AAAND every dictionary I’VE got calls it self-defense . How’s that sound?”

“Oh yeah? What's step 2?”

“SELF-DEFEND!!” blares Hammy. The rain pounds hard over their heads. That is, rain of plump cakes , puddings , and frozen microwavable pizzas. He pounds a buzzer alarm, now blaring away, and follows RJ down the fort to a balcony not far down from the roof battlements. Heather leaves the boys, traveling the rest of the platforms to ground level.

In the midst of the battlefield, against a tree trunk, Ozzie’s busy flipping through some random book with one leg over the other. Whatever’s going on in front of him drowns itself out from his carefree, isolated mind. He’d learned his lesson from last time . Though, even last time he didn’t quite have a say in the matter. His existence itself was problematic, so he sought to remove it as much as possible.

To his left, Heather stumbles in. “Dad, you might wanna move.”

“Why's that?”

“Because it’s totally about to rain... cream pies.”

A cream pie splats an inch away.

“Oh my.”

“And jello cakes.”

A fat cake of jello splats the other side.

“What a waste of gelatin delish.”

Heather now pleads for her next order: “ And fish sandwiches?”

Only a familiar banana peel flops on her head in response. She pops off regardless, having another hat instead. “ Yooo-ooo , gimme that dub too!”

They must flee once the whole barrage comes down. With the obnoxious alarm still blaring, even on the roof of RJ’s fort, Heather joins them, panting, and starts chucking food over at Verne alongside them.

The porcupine kids hold no worries against the oncoming attack. “We got this, Uncle Verne,” Spike reassures him at their fort, bringing out a little remote control for the 3 of them to manage together.

The bendy-straw gate of the outer wall on ground level raises and allows a small, robotic action figure, with big muscles and yellow hair, to exit. “ Tiiime to consume an excessive sugar intaaake,” it growls in a voice ridden with masculinity. “AAAND beat somebody uuup .”

The figurine tramples over to the foot of RJ’s fort in a stance ready to punch any perfect face silly. At least RJ gets some humor watching the tiny thing speed across the field. Grunting, its knee joint bends its calf back to kick its plastic shoe into a random box in the foundation of the outer wall. Instead of inflicting any damage, the little robot trips backward and outright dies. RJ chuckles a bit, but largely restrains the amusement slipping past the muscles of his face.

“Was that supposed to happen ?” Verne asks the kids.

“Nah. But we can make it work,” Bucky tells him.

“Bring in Gamma-Red Nine!” Quillo shouts.

The next remote control the kids heave out is larger than a keyboard. 

The gate at their entrance lifts up again, and a dinky red car, with a blinking battery light on the front hood, rolls out. RJ watches it again make its way over. It clinks against the wall, making not a dent in the box of Cheese Squares it comes against. The ensuing laughter escapes like air in a whoopee cushion: “PFFFFFFFFFFFF-”

Suddenly, the car transforms. That little hood flings out and becomes the radical head of a red robot, with pointed, deadly eyes. The car doors expand panel-by-panel into a robust set of arms, and legs to stand on. When it does, RJ’s eyes only continue to drift upward to adjust to the shape of the immense robot figure, armored with the titanium of the blood moon. RJ shoves his laughter back down his throat, and it vibrates and dies in his stomach.

It clenches metallic fingers into a rigid palm and punches straight at RJ’s handsome face. However, it stops just an inch short of his nose. He releases a huff onto it, muddled by the action, and peers over the robot’s padded shoulder.

Turns out Verne stopped the kids from their toying by trying to rip the advanced remote away from them for himself. Once he does, he takes control of the robot in their place, and snickers at RJ. “Watch out RJ, I’m too old to wait for a second chance!… So let’s have some fun with this.”

He gets a jarring level of enjoyment out of it - slashing through towers with a shapeshifting mechanized arm poised as a deadly blade , and scattering the wealth RJ wrongfully stole from his hands. It is pretty entertaining, frankly. Like any child’s dream , nearly. He destroys his kingdom before his very eyes, making sure to save the fortress for last to prolong the calamity. Tower by tower, they come down. Mt. Feeds-a-Lot itself basically reincarnates and births itself again from all the food collecting on the floor of RJ’s land. RJ’s land. Crumbling to ashes, filling Verne’s soul with borderline- murderous glee. For everything stolen from him - Hammy, a chance at Ozzie, their food, their trust - he enforces proper payback.

“Good time for a counterattack,” RJ says. “Got this, Heather?”

“Gotcha covered!” She leaps all the way from the battlement to the ground, and maneuvers the rummage already created by their fight. She leaps over crushed boxes. She leaps over exploded pastries. Over the outer wall, then to the middle of the site, back by the Hedge and far from the action, away from the sylvan rooftop.

This is where she gets a full view of the ridiculousness any tourist would pick up on. Verne's robot terrorizes another town of processed food. RJ and Hammy chuck things at it from the roof, to minimal effect. Of course, none of these actions mean anything. Heather discovers it herself - charged attacks expending their energy, trying to zap the other, only to electrocute themselves in the crossfire. The cost must be far greater than the results. These folks, split in 2, hurl perfectly-delicious donuts for no perfectly-good reason, and suddenly, in the ambiance, Heather begins to wish she had something to snack on.

“Huh. I kinda don’t think this’s what a family’s about …”

Another voice enters her head - a shockingly-precise imitation of her own. “And like, what’re you gonna DO about it, bucko?” Replaying it again, the sender in her head appears to be slightly off-beat, but consumes her state of mind. This being reads the book it finds inside, and copies the thoughts she thought not to speak. “You’re just a kiiiid.”

“Yo, who said that?”

“It’s me, your mental narrative coach!” Her attention’s brought back to the fight. “C’mon, y’know how much RJ totally wants to win this! You can't change this. So just do your part. ‘Play your cards’, or whatever he’d say. I dunno.”

“Welp, can’t NOT trust a mental narrative coach ,” she shrugs. “Let’s do this thing!”

Dwayne, even… He too gets a spectator’s view, popping out of a bush in the neighboring brush wearing a big bunny onesie to disguise himself. He doesn’t think to take action. But he intends to spy as a coyote would (in a big bunny onesie), watching the animals host a whole civil war against each other.

“Well I’ll be gosh-darned . The lady forwards me all the resident notices, and y’know what?” He leans farther through the leaves for a better view. “The only problem I see is how great of a SHOW this is! Wow-wie!”

Heather kicks a foot forward into the dirt to slide underneath a stray bagel whizzing right down from above like a saucer. The fort of Team Oak encroaches on her quickly. She treads far into the desolate field of enemy territory, where shattered stacks of pale crackers lie dead on the ground, and another is crushed into smaller bits under her foot. Over the outer walls, she easily sneaks into the mainland.

Stiff at the back of the main fort, she stays hidden. With the dizzying scale of this monster, the options for contribution seem to be slim. The makeshift materials of the building are packed tightly enough with boxes and cans to injure herself more than any brute force would do. The surface of the walls, smooth and impenetrable, take stealth out of the equation. A can of soda is embedded in the foundation, however. At the very bottom, right beside her head, where one blast would devastate the entire base. Destruction sweeps her hesitation away, and the hype idea bounces from beat to beat.

She yanks the can out and shakes it vigorously to the point of explosion. She sticks it back in the wall, and the result is an entire chunk of food blasted out the side of the fort, covered in foamy soda.

Everyone on top loses their footing from the impact, except for Verne, who pays it no attention while he sits and furiously mans the robot.

“What. Is. HAPPENING?!” Tiger’s ears and eyes practically combust over the quakes beneath their feet, and splatters of desserts, and steaming taquitos spearing into the fort walls.

Stella leans over the edge and finds Heather to be packing the food blasted out of their wall into her 3 arms (yes, the tail is an arm). The presence of her has no place for sympathy in Stella’s mind. Enemies are enemies, and Heather was no exception. “That girl has NO clue why it takes a stinkin’ WEEK to charge this bad boy up, does she? C’mon! I want ALL hands on deck, NOW!!”

As they organize themselves, Stella speeds towards the central staircase of the fort, just waiting for her to run down. As she goes, she mutters to herself, “ Sheeee’ll learn the names of da hills, alright… Burnt on that head like rubber.”

The porcupine kids station themselves at a trio of slingshots attached onto microwave carousels, load up jello, and spin the platforms to aim at Heather.

“There she is!” Quillo exposes her making an escape with their food down below, scurrying over the outer wall of their kingdom.

“C’mon, get her!”

“Free points!"

She’s bombarded across the field with her arms and tail struggling to keep the food from slipping away.

At the gate of Verne’s fort, Stella locks herself onto it, straight ahead - the flutter of little clawed feet across the site, hoping to gain cover inside the walls of Team RPS. The base of Heather’s tail bobs to the sides during her run, waving to Stella for her to track the movement of this figure, and solidify her intent into action.

Taking one toe to home base, Heather gets downed by a clump of jello splashing the back of her head, dropping the food. By the time she can squirm to get it back, her tail already putting in half the effort, someone seizes one of the raisin boxes she goes to salvage. Her lips go dry once she glances up. Stella resists.

Verne adjusts his approach to RJ’s new tactic - using Hammy as a mounted gun, shooting a rapid stream of mixed nuts out of his cheeks. When he runs out, RJ pops open another can and pours them in Hammy's mouth. The stream is endless . For now. Verne squints at RJ’s supply, and with only a few cans remaining, he could certainly stall out the attack. Fortunately too, the nuts don’t have much of an impact on the robot’s shiny armor anyway. Verne even gets it to pose, just from one temptation.

On ground level, it's only a mess of black and white fighting for just a simple box of raisins. RJ installs a new blast of energy into his method, pouring can after can to shotgun the nuts from Hammy’s mouth in bursts. The robot, being pelted, stomps back into the dirt. Verne amplifies the robot’s defenses rapidly, pushing buttons all around, not really knowing what any of them do, but feeling open to risk, as shocking as that is for his character. Everywhere , chaos falls like meteors over the site, and miraculously, the Log faces none of its catastrophic effects.

Heather loses grip of the box. Stella, at last, works up the intensity to point herself back at the girl.

Heather trips backward into the dirt, abandoning her sweet loot. “AaAaAah!”

“Think you’re gettin’ out with yuh hands full ?! Lemme take those off of ya.” Nothing could explain the fiery passion demonstrated in Stella’s visage, the utter madness of it. “Well I am miiighty sorry it had to BE like this!!” She clenches her fists, stressing the veins, a finger on the trigger, damn ready to let loose on the oafish, unfeeling crook.

Her face goes blank when, out of the corner of her eye, the tiny image of Heather cowers back in the grass. Her legs tremble. The thumping Stella feels inside dulls, taking time to assess the situation before her. Where she was in this. Where was she? Taller Heather may be, she’s below her eye-level, and radiating the fear Stella typically thrives on. Something about her face, her open mouth, and the area of her eyes open to trauma, all the white that’s there, freezes her hair, and blows it away to reveal all to her.

“ Heath-uh …” Stella exhales from the depths of her heart, silently. She finds her knees lowering themselves. No stranger, but she surely regarded her as such. A stranger . What overcame her, and how-?

But just then, Tiger appears in front of Stella between them, bearing his fierce, pointed pupils. Him and Stella gather the food and leave after she mounts herself on his back. But before they ride off, Stella takes one last look back at Heather before frowning her eyebrows underneath her hair and brushing her insecurity away, putting on a tough attitude again.

Heather rests in her place, and scans her surroundings, panting. One thing they forgot to grab is a bowl of blueberries, just by her hip.

Up on the roof, RJ depletes the last can of mixed nuts, and their ammunition goes dry. Hammy’s left with nothing to spit.

“That’s it. We need weaponry,” RJ demands. “Whadda we got in the reserve ?”

Hammy pulls his chin down to his chest and unsheaths an entire mythical sword from his mouth. The winds come under his control when it’s put in his grip. Among the tornado now surrounding the fort, just blowing more food away than it’s worth, they’re a zephyr in the middle. The sword attracts these gusts, absorbs them, and shoots them out to attack all around it. A new sense of exposure floods over, somehow… like it was impossible to tell a lie .

Hammy has to yell louder than his typical yelling voice to beat out the winds pounding into their eardrums. “Will this one do? I found it by this weird rock in Ire-land. It’s shaped kinda like a really big fin-ger.”

“ Ehhhh … Can we get something more cartoony and comical ?”

Well well, RJ’s request definitely prompted a delivery. Heather zooms into their faces with a bowl of blueberries and a paintball gun, and knocks the sword out of Hammy’s hand. She passes the latter to RJ.

“Blue-BERRIIIEEEES !” he beams. “ HERE we go!”

He cocks it over the wall of the battlement, and intrigues Verne with this crafty plan… whatever it is. Heather springs up behind RJ and dumps a whole load of blueberries into the open chamber on top. The berries come squirting out of the gun at a rapid rate of fire.

The arm of the robot extends out metal plates that link into a circular, gray shield to protect from the blueberry assault. It’s painted the hue of a deep toxic purple.

Hammy takes his cue to pounce off the fort onto the robot’s newly-exposed elbow. He spins up to the small head of the robot and hugs tight on its neck. Despite Verne’s retaliation, the arms can't bend far enough to reach Hammy, and he pops the entire head off, exposing the wires inside. He rips them to shreds, and the robot collapses onto its knees, to the ground, limp.

“No… no NO!” Verne hammers literally EVERY button furiously enough to smash them into the controller and knock some sense into the dead guardian. A pause the newest spectators take to, his own team watching his robot fall, making idle use of themselves, forces him to lash out. “DON’T LET UP! We can't give RJ enough time to get cocky or else he'll be unstoppable! You know how he is!”

“But we're running out of cream pies,” Quillo sighs.

Bucky adds, “And jello cakes!”

Turning left and right, Spike sees no ammunition around the blank platform. “Whadda we have left ?”

“There's all those worthless fresh veggies there,” Penny points. Indeed, a giant pile of worthless fresh veggies slowly rot and dismember their freshness in the back corner of the battlement, quarantined as far from the frontlines as possible. That sightly stench grows like moss on the shaded cardboard walls.

“Ooo. Ah. They aren't gonna wanna touch that stuff,” Lou says.

The group, united, as a team, nods and heads for the towers.

Plump tomatoes hail down against the front wall of RJ's fort and explode into heavy droplets of red liquid. Him and Heather duck while unloading the endless clip of blueberries from the paintball gun.

Stella preps a head of lettuce onto a catapult made from a large wooden spoon. The first massive boulder she launches slams into the base of RJ's grand cheese-ball tower on the center of the roof. RJ and Heather have to throw themselves to the side to dodge the heavy debris of the falling tower - every barrel of the cheese balls, crushing the living remnants of the kingdom. It’s not all a loss. RJ still catches the can of Spuddies that was resting on the top, and becomes jubilant at that.

Another head of lettuce impacts the side of the fortress and takes a large chunk of processed foods out of the wall, destabilizing them. The cardboard platform of the rooftop battlement tips towards the broken side, bending in the creases and tripping their feet. They fight to stop themselves from sliding off the open edge. The hook of Jeffery’s frame inside the fort breaks loose.

One last lettuce head. Its trajectory differs from its predecessors. Over the site it flies, somehow higher than the rest, but lower at the fall. It comes down over the crumbling roof. Whose head does it clobber… but Heather’s, hitting her off the back of the high fort. She’s too taken aback to let out a peep. Down the total height, every foot, every layer, she falls to the ground.

Pushed it. The inner mechanisms, the gears in Stella’s head, grind together, and bust apart. What automated switch, programming her every move in this senseless battle, flips off, deactivating her voice. “Oooohwww, dat-... I didn’t do dat.” Her arms are so stiff. Even though the string over her head ripped off, she felt attached, but to a new feeling. She slowly backs away from the rest of ‘Team Oak’ as the assault continues, and they continue serving a desire for dominance that they themselves hold no share in. Verne had it all. Her calves are so tight.

From the top, she spins and spins. She bolts back down the inner staircase of the spiral tower, where the grass floor grows closer.

She opens the mailbox on the outer border and peeks through into the world beyond. Heather lies in the rubble of the demolished wall, and besides the large sore she looks to be rubbing off on her skull, she’s fine and well as any Heather she knew was . 

Hammy runs over to help her up. “Are you okay?”

“ Yeah … I hated those brain cells anyway. Too much thinking and stuff, y’know. Usually I’m smarter when I try to be dumb anyway.”

“Oh good, we can give them to Uncle RJ. His head’s like a gumball machine of those little rascals.”

Stella’s sigh of relief pumps her heart again, after going still in that one revealing moment.

Verne yanks her away. “Stella ! We gotta rebuild, come on !!”

RJ flings his teammates right back onto their unsteady feet. “Up , let's go! Stack, STACK, STAAAAACK!!”

XXX

The moon swerves up and punches the sun around the edge of the earth. The sun returns to do the same.

Dwayne plops down in his office with a plate, a tall spray can reading ‘Powdered Toast’, and a steaming cup of coffee. He shakes up the can and sprays sparkling brown powder around on his plate, magically forming into a slice of toast. Licking his lips, he picks it up with both hands.

In a large and petty stamped envelope, a little gift , wrapped in a caustic red bow and signed by Ms. Wright, waits for him on his desk. He stuffs the whole slice of toast into his mouth and yanks up the letter to rip it open. Inside, he finds a multitude of blueprints.

The first is a replica of a hidden cage trap in a patch of grass. Though it’s modified to exclude the torching devices on the bottom that activate when something gets caught.

"No flames ?" he scoffs. "Are we gonna tickle 'em to death? Like we’re running some kinda clown operation now? Eh come to think of it, I’d take the raise."

He looks up, and suddenly, that very trap is sitting on his desk, in mint condition. So he moves on.

The next is a diagram of a bear trap, its teeth described to be strong enough to snare any animal, but too tame to harm any human leg. 

Just like the other, it’s on the desk when he glances up. From this angle, it appears even more harmless than in its drawing.

He chucks the page away. "No. Nu-uh."

Then there’s a diagram of a harmless vermin repellent, posing no threat to any average citizen. 

The can is on the desk. He smacks it off and rolls his eyes. It’s like his mother was packing him safety supplies for camp. They were the handicaps none of the other kids seemed to need. Yet, this woman wanted him to stuff these kiddy gadgets in his pack, just to take up space, providing such minimal and dull usage that bare hands themselves could accomplish. Yeah, why not just punch the animals at that point? Knock them senseless? Anything with a brain could avoid these ‘traps’ unscathed, and considering the animals seemed to steal the brain cells of the townsfolk along WITH their food, it certainly wasn’t a desired approach.

But the last diagram suddenly interests him. Pointless games were over. Something about it distincts itself to him, looking like a cattle prod and a net gun had a destined child. Even sounding out its title at the top of the page brings him great enjoyment: “The ‘TazePro'... '(Beta)'.”

This one DOESN'T appear on the desk right away, muddling him.

Perhaps it needed another glance. Some kind of codeword? He continues on with the fine print included. “'Contains enough voltage to paralyze and/or electrocute small animals… with no harm to the public residents'.” At that he laughs. “We-ell no harm to the public residents, of course!” He comes to a mutter: “But if I ever pass those jerks from jury duty again-”

A single flicker of electricity comes from the end of the desk. It appeared.

At the circular loop marking the end of a road, and the top of a hill, teams RPS and Oak hide on opposite sides of the street. A lemonade stand waits, parallel to the road. A happy little girl is there, sitting patiently behind the desk, waiting to sell a cup to any lucky soul for a whopping 51 cents . The climate opted for it. High at noon, the sun melts all on her face but a grin away. She stocked her load to the max - several giant, transparent plastic drums filled with lemonade keep their chill from the ice cubes packed inside. A crowd of these things are kept ready behind her seat, taller than the stand itself. Under this weather, it couldn’t be long before some thirsty customers came her way, assuming they were daring enough to place a foot outside at all. And of course, with some critters to boot as well.

Awful heat sends thermal shockwaves through the air. This particularly sweltering day holds no mercy for that which brewed it. In one rusted cauldron, the poor Hedgies must’ve mixed every ingredient from every day over the past week to boil the poison up to this point. The frenzy. The fights. The forts. They mixed them all, and out exploded a searing cloud, fuming and melting with red, that set the day aflame under the harrowing sun.

Some bushes on the right side of the circle make for the hood of the cloak Verne and his team wear. They shroud themselves not for mischievous stealth or a dark air of mystery… but to literally umbrella themselves from the molten rain hailing over them. Inside, the large leaves at least provide some cover from hell’s rays.

A primitive instinct kicks in through Verne’s voice, thirsting over the set of barrels. “That… is a lot of lemonade.”

“Yeah, let’s hope it’s lemonade,” spits Spike.

"We’re not TTTHAT thirstyyy," Quillo agrees. 

Bucky rips over the leaves of the bush to scrape off the drooping sweat down his cheeks. “But it’s soooo hot out todaaay .”

The piercing gleam of ice cubes comes from the top of a full cup ready on the desk, and into Tiger’s eyes. “My… if only just a glass …” He begs for it with an eager paw.

Verne scans the area further. That glass of lemonade Tiger’s looking at does seem appealing.

Then he goes solemn.

He discovers RJ, Heather, and Hammy in an opposite bush on the other side of the circle, unknown to him. The raccoon, recently pronouncing himself as a loathsome figure to Team Oak, spies through binoculars at the stand, with additional binoculars held up by the other 2 in front of the lenses of his for extreme magnification. Verne shifts his head to the left, north-westward-bound. Behind the Hedge, the towers of their forts hold a level of erection completely neck and neck . The steaming air dying in the sky rattles the image, and he makes one of an obtainable future to climb for - one lemonade cup , missing from their peaks, that would make or break the entire competition. One cup spelt victory, for him.

The heat goes numb in the furnace of his shell. It doesn’t escape through breathing space, but sifts out the burning into his skin, where it can run wild and pep up his toes. Like a thermometer it pulses to the peak of his top. “Get the cup.” Pushing Tiger along, he panics, “Get the CUP ! Quick, HURRY !”

Tiger lingers in place for a moment, but conforms to the command for purely selfish reason, wandering his way out of the bush. The heat pummels his coated skin without hesitation. Somehow, the human child at the stand is restless . Moisture expels from her body tenfold, but she doesn’t blink. The street is desolate without customers, but she searches, and smiles. 

From the sidewalk, Tiger takes a concentrated breath. He outlines his path. The dashed lines he imagines, that stretch before him, travel the crust of the curb at the perimeter of the circle, swerving to the front of the lemonade stand. He presumes a stance of indomitable focus. Blood cools around his bones, to allow him to assess his trail in full. Following under the curb, he receives sufficient cover from the owl-eyed girl.

Something new enters RJ’s triple-binocular sight: a cat. Tiger crawls quickly behind the curb, avoiding the hyperactive gaze of the child, and jumps up to shade himself beside the sign glued on the front of the stand. Not certain his eyes aren’t deceiving him, RJ fidgets out a signal to have Hammy and Heather lower the 3 pairs of binoculars. His bare eyes paint the thievery of his destined prize.

“Aw great ,” he mocks. “'The cavalry’s here!' Pffft.”

RJ gets a remote control and a large helicopter model, flipping it on and releasing it above their bush like a butterfly. Carefully, he flies it freely high in the sky, out of sight, and lowers it not above the stand but behind, where the stash of lemonade barrels reside. He thrusts the palm of his hand against a green button on the control. Out a hatch on the bottom of the chopper, a hook lowers from a thick string. It links onto a ring atop the backmost barrel’s lid.

"He-heeeeeeh ," RJ snickers. "Go on ‘n take the cup , Verne. We’ve got the barrels handled, don’t mind us ! Oh, no sir-ee !"

Hammy and Heather murmur something unclear to each other, incredulous in their faces. RJ gives the helicopter lift and leans it forward, but the drum doesn’t budge. To great difficulty, it starts to tip backward on its rim, the bottom face coming off the ground, giving micro pebbles underneath the chance to breathe. Then, the hook of the helicopter snaps off.

Heather decides to check in on a very stunned RJ. “Uhhhh RJ ? Ya good?”

"Listen, don’t put this on my resume, okay?"

The tank rebalances itself on the base when it comes down, but the extra momentum rocks it the other way - towards the stand and the fellow tanks, filled fully to the brim with cold lemonade, ready to blow . One top half of a drum dongs into another, and soon enough they prepare to collapse over the human girl. She sees a shadow stretching over her back and makes the grave mistake of turning around. Shortly she screams a bloodcurdling scream and abandons her chair in response.

"TIG'UH!" Stella hollers.

The barrels of lemonade nearly crash over him and smash the cardboard stand into mush. He gasps and flings the cup straight upward before fleeing the area. The tops of the drums land horrifically on the sidewalk and burst open, flooding the whole circle with gushing lemonade in seconds. A golden tsunami unleashed.

Whatever dam this little girl’s stand could be called, RJ’s failed gambit has it collapsed. The length of the street floods into a violent river , sweeping over the concrete and storming down like a landslide, miles a minute. One human providing a tour to another on the sidewalk both stop to watch the rage of lemonade come down the street. On the clean neighborhood map one holds, the gray drawing of this particular street runs down the gauge in yellow. Once the first wave of lemonade slams past the intersection at the end of the slow hill - the finish line - the street signs bust loose and spin around until they latch back in place to appropriately rename it ‘Lemonade Lane’ .

The cup - that one, singular cup of lemonade - lands back down into the new river and bobs up and down as it begins to migrate down the gentle slope of the hill, though a tiny sliver of its contents spill off the rim and into the greater reservoir of the beverage. RJ and Verne now lash at it with their eyes, hyper focused as much as the other, knowing well enough it was time for a stand.

Trailing behind the cup, two ships remain afloat: the broad poster board once advertised on the front of the stand, and the thin sign labeling what was once the stand’s name, with its marker writing washed away. 

With this thirst, and desperation, and the flames of the scathing air powering their engines, both teams fail to live without picturing the cup as theirs. Nothing else fuels them, but again a primitive urge, organized by the leaders they’ve affiliated themselves with. Verne and RJ get them to go after the former and latter signs, shotgunning themselves out of the bushes.

They go aboard, and without hesitation. On the thin strip, RJ figures out what to do with his 2 crew members immediately, no time to dwell with the cup flowing further from their grasp. “Our new target be that cup o’ GOLD , mateys! HOIST THE SAILS!!”

"WE DON’T HAVE SAILS!" exclaims Hammy. 

"If we don’t have a ship then BEEE the ship! We need more knots ! Man the rudd’ar!"

“Aye-aye, sir!!” they answer.

The great agent of lemonade retrieval, in a raccoon’s form, pushes them to the back of the boat, for only one thing powers their engines. They convert this energy, this motive, to kinetic, with Hammy spinning his tail into the water behind them as a propeller, accelerating them dramatically. Heather applies her own as a rudder, pushing the flow against either side of the boat to steer them underneath the dark side of a parked car. Once they reemerge, Team Oak is already on the same plane as them, rowing furiously atop the broad poster board with colored straws as full as their frantic faces.

Rather than contributing to the effort, the kids badger the waters for a drink off the raw concrete. The turbulent, vicious motion of the current doesn’t donate much. Not more than a drip or two makes it through their straw oars. 

“Don’t DRINK that pavement juice, ROW, ROW, ROW!” Verne scolds them.

They meet at the cup in the middle.

Verne thrusts his arm over the stream, at the styrofoam rim of the cup. It slips just a micrometer from his grasp, and sways closer to RJ’s dirty hand attempting to acquire the same. Oh how he wished to wash that dark brown right off and expose the wicked man underneath. The river offers no support but continues to rock the cup unpredictably between them. Verne’s arm strains and quivers, stretching his rough skin like ripping a cooked steak apart. The tip of his finger brushes over the cup. Nearly, he throws himself overboard just to get an inch closer. But then a black, snake-like tail swipes the cup away from him, and swallows his hopes whole.

The way the porcupine kids so threateningly fume at Heather once she secures the cup for herself only cools her with the fan of vengeance for those desserts launched at her earlier. The tops of their heads boil with the smoke of the relentless sun. That, metaphorically and literally. 

The belittling little dance she adds to her bragging notion really doesn’t help. “Totally didn’t see that move comin’!”

“RAM ‘em!” Stella shouts. “This cup’s OURS , boys, or it ain’t no one’s!”

Verne’s entire boat leans back and thrust themselves to the side to ram into RJ’s. The cup jerks away from Heather and lands behind them at the edge of the street… and approaching the gutter of the curb. It sits on the gridded drain, pushed by small bits of lemonade to the very edge, where it is carried into the dark pit.

"NO!" cries RJ. 

He quickly swerves them over, and Heather leaps head-first to grab the cup before it falls into the sewers. Hammy makes a rope from her tail. RJ grabs Hammy’s. He tries to keep their balance on the boat, but slips immediately, lunging them all into the pit themselves.

Before they have time to utter a shriek, before being banished away for good, something jerks back on RJ’s tail. The black abyss lies below, to which they're suspended above. RJ's tail holds him like the chain of a collar, stressing the curve up the center of his back, refraining from subjecting his spine to gravity's claim. Lemonade trickles into the sewers and splashes his stomach from the edge of the gutter. Hammy forms the glue between him and Heather, who bears the weight of the cup in her arms at the end of the furry rope. Half its contents spilled in the process. It held enough inside to pressure her grip still, but diminished in value.

Between the hairs and tan rings, a pair of black hands tugs strongly on RJ’s tail. A clawed foot embeds itself in the concrete of the curb. Its nails run the rough of the rock without a sound. Only the waves of flowing lemonade remain there to drown out no one else but Ozzie’s grunts as his entire body shakes in balance. He leaned as deep as he could into the drain, fearful of further extension, as his footing required a strong anchor from ship to dock to keep the crew from slipping in the current. 

He tugs. He musters the strength to pull them up. Heather manages to glance back at him, and he only responds with the effort of his arms, taking the place of the promising words he couldn’t expel between breaths. The tips of the right foot grind against the block and back on the current. Boat held by the hook of the left. The slight turbulent waves misshapen and bend the bottom face of the board below him. It keeps thrusting forward aggressively. The festering red in his face, and his loss of consciousness, stalls as a result of a hideous crack that darts up his back.

After Ozzie gets them up, he releases his traction, and the ride resumes. He topples over at the rear of the board. The others pick themselves up, and the first thing Heather comes across is her dad’s exhausted body right in front of her, from knees up to the underside of his snout sticking up from his chest. A greater incline on the boat came from the extra weight his limp self added to the back.

Judging by her uncertainty over the matter, it’s clear the responses she planned for this graceous instance were limited. “Wow, thanks… dad.”

Ozzie aches, shoving hard on his spine as he rigidly bends himself upright. “I've just cracked my back one too many tiiiiimes to-day so could we please hurry this UP? And…” With a grin of worthy defeat, he falls flat forward onto the board to relax himself. “You're welcome, Heather.”

RJ gasps when Lou and Penny steal the cup away from Heather with a mechanical grabber. The final surge of lemonade at the back of the stream, the last of the spill, steals their breath and accelerates them, bumping them back into action immediately. Verne’s boat, with the couple holding the handle together in a perfect balance to keep more lemonade from spilling, starts to drift ahead.

Act fast! RJ holds no resentment toward time’s demands. “Spin that tail like there’s NO TOMORROW, Hammy!”

Hammy whirls past Ozzie to the very back and resets himself into position. His tail sprays the water out the back again; the excitement of the water makes an airboat of their cardboard plank. Like a viking on conquest he blows through his horn as glorious as the treasures ahead. “FOOOOOOR TOMORROW-LAAAAND!!”

“‘N YOU two,” RJ points to the opossums. “You’d better work out who’s gonna be my personal harpoon here before I executively nominate Heather!”

“Why are you looking at me ?” Of course, to combat the inevitable, Ozzie’s weak shield against the immediate, anticipating eyeballing he gets from RJ is crafted from pure, flimsy innocence. “I-I’m completely unbiased here!”

Heather, having rolled her eyes as he said that, even more innocently locks her fingers together against her stomach and fiddles with them awkwardly in the silence. The other boys still stare at him.

After a second he admits, “A smidge biased.”

Verne takes his spirits to the high seas once Lou and Penny begin to reel in the loot from the solid, metal length of the grabber. “Steady there,” Penny warns as the relentless waves bully the hull of the board and shake the cup while they hold it carefully over the side.

Something grabs onto the cup and nearly hauls the porcupines right over. Ozzie’s extended arms drop the plank between the ships, the rest of his body being held stiffly horizontal over the river between both boats now jarringly closer than they were before. For a second, they looked like one united group again , and surely they would from just a bird’s eye view. Those hopes were sullen anyway.

“Ozzie?!” Penny blares.

Lou stares him down. "Looks like it’s grown-up... to grown-up."

"I did NOT ASK FOR THIS!!" Ozzie squeals at his face. 

RJ yanks back on Ozzie’s legs from his ship, keeping the ‘personal harpoon’ part a sure promise. A little spills out the cup. The porcupine couple resists. All hands on deck become all hands up over each other once everyone involves themselves in this tug-of-war. They jerk back and forth on their representatives, their pawns of the matter, until solid rubber crashes against Verne on the bow. A car tire blocks their path, killing all momentum for Team Oak. The ship of Team RPS continues stubbornly onward with the flow of the river, ripping the cup out of both the grabber and Ozzie’s grasps, spilling half its contents and plopping into the waters. Ozzie’s left with no one to cling to, and falls in .

The cup slowly veers up to RJ from the side of the board, and he catches it with fidgety hands. “WOOO-O-OO! Nice work ! C’mon, let’s speed it up you two!!”

Heather goes back with Hammy, but finds Ozzie to be caught up in his own wave behind them. She doesn’t speak, but watches. Thinks .

The setback from the tire crippled Verne to a point dreadfully far behind the squirrel-propelled opponent. His team shares the same disheartening feeling.

Lou panics. “I- We’re-... We’re slowing dooown!”

“WORSE, Lou, much worse …” Penny gulps. “THEY’RE SPEEDING UP!!”

Tiger doesn’t hesitate to act. He flips back off the board into the lemonade behind them. Stella finds it difficult to understand his aim at first until, standing strong enough in the river to stay on foot, he charges his head like a bull into the back of the ship and launches it forward. He jumps back on just in time, now soaked underneath the stomach in the very lemonade-antidote they cannot seem to secure.

That effort gets them closer , but their valiant acceleration quickly fades. Meanwhile, RJ drifts beyond them at a steady pace, farther down the hill.

“We’re still too heavy!” Verne says.

He looks at his own team, all hopeless and fatigued, and eyeballs the porcupines particularly. The mass of Lou and Penny alone nearly took up half the board, upon inspection. There was a cap on Verne’s progress. Simply, he couldn’t afford to save more assets in desperate times. If a one-many army was what he needed, then this board’s for him to steer.

Verne sighs just as heavily as he described. “Lou…” 

The sight of his countenance injects a smidge of remorse into his blood. As the surface of the lemonade spill glistens in the sun, Verne’s only brought back to Lou, blinded by the environment.

“Penny…”

Her reaction works the same against him. It tries to shower him in gloom. And in a sense, the waters smear his skin, as the waves of the river trickle against his legs. Though like the river, he travels forth, so the sag in her cheeks, and tilt of her nose, fail to subdue him.

“We’re at our last options , I... Take the kids back to shore. We need you to. We’ll meet back up later. Promise.”

“No need for promises Vern-o,” Lou huffs. “We understand.”

The porcupine family gets dropped off at the sidewalk, with the last of the lemonade passing by. The road becomes just a road again. A damp, steaming aisle of pavement. The tips of their quills drip endlessly in the stuff, the liquid gold, and not a single morsel enters their mouths.

They can’t see his expression from behind his shell, but Stella and Tiger share the absent winds he blocks from them to feel. But with the breeze away, their eyes are allowed to open wider. They’re wider when they watch the porcupines fade away from sight. They’re wider side-by-side, mind-to-mind. A boulder blocks the path. The two come to a consensus , and nod.

“‘ We ’?” Stella clarifies with Verne.

Verne doesn’t glance back. He retains the sulky, focused stare locked onto RJ’s back as their distance gradually shortens. “We. As in, for us ?”

“Now who is this ‘ us ’?” Tiger interrogates, slowly to his ears. “My eyes speak better than my nose … and I only see you . We … are still a family . We were a team.”

Verne now shoots around to meet the couple. The sternness held in his frown gets lost in their opposition, and the opposition shatters the glass of reality over his head. Sternness goes to insecurity. The cuts he feels terrorize his whole body. His support fleets.

“We were foragers ,” Tiger claims. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

Team RPS races on. An ice cream man stands at the final stretch of the street on the left, who simply displays awe at the lemonade surging in the street where the wheels of his cart sit. Those said wheels unlock from a large wave of lemonade that comes forth, and the man doesn’t have enough time to catch the cart before it makes its own detour down the steepest slide of the hill. It tips and crashes over, the lid on top breaking open and exploding with an iceberg of strawberry ice cream in front of RJ’s boat.

With no time to react, he tries to swerve the front of the boat to the right and out of the way. But that only leaves the back half to get stuck in the ice cream - Heather and Hammy’s half. The board quickly snaps in two, entirely from the waters still shoving it through, and RJ departs to continue flowing while his team is left abandoned . But he still has the cup, and therefore doesn’t falter on the event much, staring ahead.

Heather and Hammy just stare ahead at the back of his stone-hearted head. Their ears droop low. What emotions they muster in the moment don’t spring their enthusiasm. They sink down, and the ice cream melts against them, like their attachment as a family, a team… foragers , sizzles under the heat. Their chins sink the same.

“Bro, he… he really just left us,” Heather says. “No words , just… He so coulda made it interesting , at least . Buuut he didn’t . Nope. Nuh-uh. Gone-o-rama.”

“I’m starting to think we’re not getting any lemonade today.”

Ozzie keeps his nose in a good book as the lemonade carries him and the lounge he’s found in its rhythmic flow. The unfracturable will of nature (or whatever) drifts him into the pile of ice cream with them, chilling his fur.

“Just between us sweetheart,” he whispers to Heather. “I’m all for moving homes, frankly. But if I spoke it, I’m sure I’d only be fueling the flames they've ignited. The heat is un bearable today! So I’d just really, REALLY rather not get caught up in…” He motions to the sheer ridiculousness of the river. “... this !”

"Yeah yeah, I think I get whatcha mean now."

Verne sails alone on his boat now, paddling like a scrawny cat around the ice cream obstacle. To his fright, RJ’s made a dock out of the intersection at the end of the path, running down the perpendicular sidewalk of the adjacent road. Once Verne gets there, not soon after, he hops off and storms after him, festering as much speed as a turtle could.

The abandoned, and abandoning members all line up from afar. They watch the lemonade run out of sight, a thousand gallons away from their mouths, some draining into sewers, and wasted on just one cup in the mix - a measure of wealth more than a drink. Their throats are dryer than they were when they started. The ice cream already starts to melt away. Their shoulders slouch down. The kids collapse on the pavement outright, too thirsty to move. Ironic that they were all soaked head to toe in lemonade.

Stella picks out Ozzie first to direct the gnawing teeth of her diatribe. “Well I see you’re just goin’ ‘n PICKIN’ SIIIIDES , AREN’T yuh Oz’!? You’re bein’ that DIRTY MAN’S personal harpoon now or somethin’?!”

“About that-”

“Well yuh AIN’T HIIIDIN’ NOTHIN’!! THAT raccoon’s gone gettin’ away, ‘n OUR man’s lost it too. Verne’d dump us overboard for 50 cents worth of that ‘liquid gold’! 50 cents, Oz’!”

“It was… actually 51 on the sign-”

“We’re all worth 50 CENTS to those two!! We’re disposable as NAPKINS to them! Dude, you’ve got NO RHYME, ‘n NO REASON, to keep goin’ actin’ like you’re OOOOOOH so ‘unaffiliated’ here-!”

“STOP my love!” Tiger throws himself between her and Ozzie before someone (the latter) gets assaulted in more ways than one. “Ozzie, explain yourself!”

“It saved me from doing it-” Heather intervenes.

Ozzie presents her with a twirling hand to agree: “It saved Heather from doing it.”

“-Which is, check check , kinda like his thing to hold me back, so …”

“I digress . It seems to be that I am just… here , among you. Is this what you're fighting for? Is this your fight at all? Is THIS what you WANT yourselves to BE ?! Chasing day after day , fighting over CRUMBS you can’t even eat, when you could be gathering a FEAST for yourselves, together as one ! This very instance is NOT a retribution! NONE of you are at fault. A feast … just a feast . Tell me.”

Again, head-to-toe in lemonade. It drips off their fur, staining them all from the waist down in the very best case, but Ozzie remains as the only one to be turned completely yellow. With the least involvement, he’d somehow been hit the worst by the spill. He shows a firm posture nonetheless, amazingly appearing unmoved by the ordeal, while the others quiver and jeer the afternoon in their low heads.

Stella comes back to glancing at Heather, and is reminded of some painfully-recent regrets. Her skin goes soft for one second underneath those black hairs, then ready themselves immediately again, when her thirst is the first to end.

“The guy’s right …” She now infuses her temper. “The guy’s RIGHT! What is all dis for?! We fightin’ for our HOME, fellas?!” As a little correctory note, she points to Heather and Hammy. “Not you 2.”

Heather and Hammy back down a bit, with some insult dealt.

“Or are we alllll gonna stand here ‘n act like we’d kill ourselves for a stupid glass o’ LEMONADE?!”

“ Ohhhhh I dunno, I'd die for some lemonade …” Hammy humbly objects.

Heather baps him on the head softly. “I’m staging a rebellion,” she then says.

“Honestly girl,” Stella starts. “You’re cool ‘n all, but you still gotta finish rebelling against your dad before you step it up to the big world.”

This jolts a bit more vocality in her, as she sweats in the heat just as much as the others. “Well OKAY then, I’ll just back my butt up into this angsty little ice cream dump over here, cya later…”

Stella tries to take command over them, just like their leaders did. “Fellas, I am staging a REBELLION! We have been OVERWORKED, and pinned ourselves against each other long enough ! Part of it’s probably MY fault! I pushed Verne towards it! Fellas-!”

Sudden commotion runs off the rails.

Ozzie clenches his nails against his ears and screeches his say into the mix: “Hush! Hush ! HUSH, for the LLLIFE of you!”

He shoves his words into their jaws to silence them. Stella stops shouting overhead the podium she’s made of Tiger. Heather stops backing her angsty self up into the angsty little strawberry ice cream pile. Hammy stops trying to lick the dampness of the lemonade off his tail and puts his tongue back into his mouth. Only now he chokes up his entire soul on a bit of fur he picked up along the way.

At this point, Ozzie’s just trying his best to conserve his battery. “I want nothing to do with this ! Truly. And so long as my daughter is sound in my sight, and I have the quiet to HEAR my own thoughts …” He puffs a stale breath. “...it’ll stay that way. Please… be a family again , if it’s not too much to ask for once this week while we’re standing here DRENCHED in lemonade, with somehow not one drop to drink in what 90 degree weather we’re having?”

“IIIII am still kinda thirsty,” concedes Lou.

Penny disregards all sense of proper grammar. “Same here, there.”

“Ozzie’s right,” Tiger narrates. “They are, at present, scorching themselves in their own rays. We've tackled over a single beverage those two 'RULERS' never intended for us, or themselves, to drink!”

Stella chuckles. “Yea-uh, I’d prefer if we tackled in a nice, cold swimming pool instead-”

Tiger thrusts a paw in her direction, the tension so high that any stray comment ruins his moment. “WE ARE NOT WHO WE USED TO BE! And we will not continue this foul path! So that cup is something we must now remove from our sights . NO MATTER who’s leading us. Once that is done, their intentions WILL become true. Let us END this kerfuffle, my friends, for TODAY, we hold PEACE FIRM in our GRRRASP-!”

Heather violently performs the heimlich on Hammy while his choking continues. It’s magically cured when they go to give the others the big thumbs-up.

Stella digresses from the situation. “What my man’s tryin’ to say is ‘LET’S GO ’!”

The hairs on the back of Ozzie’s head start to rustle. He confronts the force of something new he feels brush over him from the horizon behind them. “ At last we feel the breeze .” It carries their legs forth, together.

XXX

Verne carries himself along the sidewalk, tripping over nearly every stray pebble, witnessing his nemesis disappear further than his legs can manage. But he fights hard .

Even when RJ presumes he’s in the clear, out of nowhere, a newspaper flies over his nose and slaps his face, turning the world into a colorless string of huge boxes and numbers wherever he looks.

“OooOOOoo,” Hammy utters ghoulishly. “It is I, the ghost of SudokuuuUUuu! Fiiiinish me RJ, FIIIIIINISH MEEEEE!”

RJ roughly flings him and the paper off his face and straight to the solid ground. “AGH! What is with you?!”

He finds his hands empty of the prize. Verne leaves the sidewalk ahead of him with the cup to run through the shaded side of the nearest house towards the backyard, and the brim of the Hedge visible at the end. RJ growls.

Heather and Stella are one step ahead of Verne, with cans of Wacky Whip prepared.

“ Aaaaaand done.” Heather completes her drawing on the ground while Stella leans back and watches against the orange bricks of the house. She backpedals to Stella’s flank. A puddle of whipped cream in the shape of a quadruped turtle in the grass smiles at them.

“Hmm. We’re pretty good, girl,” Stella nods.

“Bob Ross, take a look at me nowww.”

They clink the caps of their bottles together. Heather proceeds to stuff the cave of her mouth with whipped cream while Verne, prowling carelessly with the cup, slips forward on the puddle and faceplants into it, flinging the cup forward.

When he lifts his face out, he shakes off the smiley face of cream obscuring his view. The cup anchors his eyes near the back corner of the house. None of the yard behind it is yet visible. That edge the cup sits on curves over and down, with the sun pressing it in, suggesting a considerable slope right past the cup’s place.

He takes himself as fast as he can to chase down the cup. RJ rams into him at just the same time, and both amass their hands on it. They fight over it like the last cookie in the jar, RJ and Verne.

“I NEED it!”

“It’s MMMINE!”

Ozzie releases himself from a tree branch leaning above the side of the house and holds a palm out in front of RJ and Verne as they hurry to the edge, every hair tinted with the yellow of their doing. Out comes a powerful shout: “HALT! I command it!”

Instead of halting, they run their arms right into him, throwing all 3 over the mud on the top of the grassy hill into the backyard. Ozzie’s left on the ground, with RJ and Verne caught like a net together, sliding down the hill with more lemonade spilling out, their limbs and tails picking up hidden metal bear-traps in the grass along the way that bite at them and pierce their skin.

A large rock knocks them up onto the center of a trampoline at the bottom of the yard. They sink in, stretching their skin further, increasing the tension of the fabric beyond undoing, pulled deeper into the inescapable depths of the dome, prompting them to gulp once the motion finally stops.

They fly up, and the cup leaves their united hands just as quickly as it swapped hands prior. It heads into the stratosphere as RJ and Verne bounce lower and lower, fighting in the high air, before landing limp on the base of the trampoline. They lie against each other in the aftermath, adding purely ugly , uncouth colors onto the center of the black fabric.

“Just for fair warning…” Verne huffs. “I could tackle you.”

“Not if I do it first .”

The last sprinkle , the FINAL one, of lemonade comes spilling back onto their faces, washing their need for authority off. The cup lands in their laps afterward. They both reach to look inside. There’s absolutely nothing left. Not one drop.

Their ‘teammates’ crowd around the trampoline and re-enter their brains in a swarm. Before RJ and Verne were harmed a scratch, the fur of the others already felt the lemonade drench over. Not a single one of them fuses their feelings with the juvenile joy of the sun, laughing mischievously over them.

What’d any of it do ? Every leaf burnt half its bones away. The porcupines stand an extra step of distance from Verne, forced into shadows before they’d think to go lost. Out of all the visages seen here, now, a glimpse of loyalty remained on their lips, but it was shoved back into their clenching teeth. Stella and Tiger force themselves further in contrast, one step closer in the grass, and search now to follow up on their vigilant action - to stomp the ruler further into their responsibility. Heather and Hammy carry extra flakes of melting ice cream to boot, pink and an eyesore over their bodies, coming from an unattended risk in their duties.

Ozzie, still a benign figure, saw his worthfulness squeezed like a lemon into the river itself, then flung away. He’s upfront, ahead of the pack, taking with him the neutral authority to confront RJ and Verne over their misconduct, and their neglect to what was once a ‘family’ in practice, not just name.

With the metal traps from the yard latched onto them, RJ and Verne suffered more ultimate pain than the victims. They’re kept from the audience, but not on a stage, more like a backlot disaster quite crass. Verne states it as clear as a fish bowl of glass: “Were… we gonna stack an empty cup on those forts?”

"We're freaks."

" Food freaks."

In the dead of night that day, Dwayne invigorates the languid air by switching on the radio in his mobile commanding base - the officially-assigned Verm-Tech truck. Funky music puts the boogie in his tapping boot. He flicks open a spotless silver case on the dashboard. In it, he picks out a pair of black glasses by the arm, having lenses tinted a voltage blue.

Once he plants them onto his face over his regular glasses, nothing in his line of sight can be hidden by the darkness. The suburban landscape alights like a retro screen. Leaves of bushes wave his way, fully rendered in this night-vision view. 

He juts a black rod out the open truck window. Attached onto the forked muzzle, a form of electric generator is supported underneath the end of the barrel, wires wrapped around a thin metal arm holding it. Once flicked on, the generator produces neon blue sparks at the barrel’s exit. It emits a high, ringing noise whose pitch slips up the accelerating slope of a slide.

The gun picks its target, being a stone statue of a decorative cat on a marble pedestal at the entrance of a front yard. It unleashes a blast of blue electricity onto the figure from the truck. The jolt explodes on the object, and sparks surge around its surface, lingering before fading away.

Down the whole street the truck makes its trip, while the electric door gunner continues its fire on anything resembling something of its desire - from an inflatable giraffe, to clay frogs on tiny pond shores… to a plastic flamingo. They leave no dents or damage , stinging instead from the inside . What true power lies in each shot is yet to be discovered. They could precisely pierce the skin like needles and infiltrate in an instant.

The radio beats along to the shots Dwayne takes, and he follows the lead of the lyrics in turn: “Life is goooood … Feelin’ greeeaaat … Put a big steak hoagie right on my plaaaate -”

He kills the radio and slams the brakes on a whim. He weaves to the side of the street in this moment as well. He knew he saw it. That speck trailing to the upper rim of the tinted lenses over his eyes. Movement from the scrawny figure stuck out over the skyline, apart from the chimneys. It pinpointed itself to him, and now it wouldn’t escape. He immediately shuts off his headlights to hide the position of the truck.

“Squirrel?”

Once he pops his head out the open window, he finds just what he’s looking for. Through the aid of his night-vision, Dwayne uncovers this rooftop scoundrel far down yonder, on a particular house separated from him by another row of residences on the neighboring street, parallel to this one. It would take a whole detour to confront it directly. Instead, he opts to assess the playing field by alighting at the squirrel’s presence and hurrying into action, tuning the truck devices stationed nearby.

“ Infrareeeed …” Dwayne carries out this process after further scouting the squirrel from his obscure position, flicking switches left and right, and pulling down a panel embedded on the roof.

The circular screen on the face of the panel displays a grid lined by green, this radar tracking the life around the nearby vicinity. Everything appears normal with the large, public-resident-hopefully-NOT-the-jury-duty-guys-sized dots scattered inside where the closest houses would be, but then a smaller dot appears. And another. And another. They form and flutter every tick like a swarm of gnats inside the house the squirrel is atop. His grin grows.

In fact, he’s nearly giddy. “Oh look at ‘em squirm.” He tap tap taps on the radar, teasing a fish in the bowl. “If they were tusslin’ over lemonade , they must REALLY be snaggin’ each others’ tails in there, oh-ho- ho! How’s the squirrel?”

He spies on the roof with binoculars, tracking the squirrel toying with some kind of circular, bumpy object, too far to make out. But the patterns of his stagnant finicking attract him more.

“Wait, watch him move . Ah! There … You see his tail’s flapping , not flicking . His foot’s like melted butter on that roof. Wait a minute… yeeeah, his blinking’s twice as slow . Tired. He’s tired ! YYYYYES!”

There’s a sticky note on his dashboard, the reminder written in too fancy of a font to be of his doing: ' Minimize direct force ’. Still yet, he plugs in a dozen cords to hook up a monitor in the back area of the truck. Once it turns on, he gets camera feedback from a drone sitting on the passenger seat up front. 

A tiny red glow comes from the center of the white body, with all 4 propellers revving up to blow slight winds onto the chair. A large orange stripe runs down the middle, over the front of its face, where the small circular camera lens adjusts to the environment. Its red indicator on top continues to glow brighter as it gains lift inside the truck. Mechanical legs jut out from the bottom like stingers of a hornet. 

Cross-legged at the monitor, Dwayne steers it out the window. " Adios . Make papa proud."

It soars into the air just below the rooftops, keeping cover from the squirrel as it whirs down the street.

“This is the chief tuning in to Drone-inator Zero,” Dwayne commands as leniently as a tortoise. “If you could take out that watchtower we'll be havin' a rodeo tonight, and all will be fine 'n dandy.”

He weaves it stealthily through house shadows and lifts it up to the squirrel's roof, stalking from the very edge of the gutter down the slope. Manning it with a joystick through the camera feed of the large screen just like any kid in the 80s would, he deviously whispers, “He-he-he… Like I'm workin' a toy shop gone rogue .”

A friendly robot with a deathly stare buzzes at Hammy from the bottom of the roof. He ambles his head over to greet it, grabbing a look of its boxish, huggable body and little needle legs as adornment. To him, it's a fluttering image to give hospitality. One star gleams above it. The once-ashen surface pales to pure white. It twinkles over the robot and catches Hammy’s attention further, while it hovers up the slope, and then timidly backs down a bit once he begins to speak through his yawning:

"Oh, hello. Here to join our playdate? We’re playing go fish."

Jeffery’s in front of him with a hand of cards in his invisible, baked hands.

The drone hovers closer - an encroaching hunter. Even without Dwayne’s input, it seems to draw itself closer to the squirrel on its own accord . Such a prototype was prone to minor abnormalities, but it created no real alarm.

The lifeless tube aimed at Hammy from the front of the drone possesses its own heart for him to suck free. He pats the nearest brick as the drone eases near. “There ya goo oo , take a seat! We have extra cards. Wanna be friends? I laced Jeffery with pepper spray so I wouldn’t eat him. I won’t eat you! Don’t worry, robot buddy!”

One word. It reverberates into the lens of the camera - “ Buddy… ”

Just a couple feet away, and dying to unleash the attack, Dwayne snags at the prime time. “AHA!!”

He smashes a finger into the net button on top of the joystick. Nothing happens. Nothing comes out of the dispenser aimed forward from the drone.

“Huh?”

The red light on top of the drone fazes out and emerges as green before it goes up to Hammy, arms open wide for a hug.

“Gone- rogue!” Dwayne twists the orange stick every which way, to no response. “GONE- ROGUE!!”

The squirrel grabs onto it and squeezes the thing tightly, rupturing its signal. Before long, connection to the drone fades out entirely. The screen scares a sudden smokescreen of static into Dwayne’s face. An air of dangerous mystery and heart-pounding reality - a lifeline cut under the empty, terrifying ocean - mixes with his feelings of unkempt anger. “OH for crying’ out LOUD !!”

He leaps back over into the front seat, slams a fist on the dashboard, grinds that solicitous sticky note off with his nails, and floors the gas pedal.

“Get the drone. Get the drone. GET THE DRONE.”

XXX

So long as RJ and Verne are out of the equation, it appears to be a reasonable assumption that the whole group is just sleepwalking in an undead horde behind the two. They all emerge from the front of the house and trip over each other to at least reach the sidewalk if unable to manage anything else.

Unseen, Hammy lands from the roof behind the crowd, still hugging his new drone buddy. However, the weight of the machinery proves quite bearing. He struggles to heave it along across the barren street. The others are too busy muttering grumpy, undead things to each other to pick out Hammy’s straining grunts as anything of value. All but Hammy round the side of a house at the very end of the road, the Hedge just beside it, with RJ and Verne conversing in the front of the pack as they gather.

“We need… a unifying force,” Verne conveys to him. “That kinda thing we once had , didn’t we? Us… alllll together … We GOTTA put us back under one lock.”

They turn around and stop. 

Right away they find their ‘teams’ to be gripping onto the very edge. Not a single back stands straight. It is impossible to tell whether they’re more drained or peeved from their efforts, but nonetheless, this insidious strain creeped up their bodies all week. In Heather’s eyes, rubbing such stinging into RJ’s, the story performs itself. Verne sees it too - the fruits of labor are excavated from the buried rubble deep within, and even now, ancient statues crumble still. The statues hold traces of those who assisted in the artistry, only for a living, and not recreation in any form able to be brushed away from the dust.

RJ and Verne face each other as they continue to pace slowly.

“I would say my tail’s tingling but that’d be a bit of a cliche.” Soft Verne speaks of his genuine worry over the matter. “We’re about to start a civil war over this, when we’re already out to get dirt on our hands. We’re fighting so we can fight . SOMEONE’S gonna get hurt.” He shakes his head. “Does ANY of this make sense to you, ‘Intellect Supreme’?”

“Then join US , and we won’t have to fight at all ! Picture it Verne, we could be livin’ the good life… sitting under willow trees …” He anchors Verne by his shell up to his side underneath the cover of his arm. “…picking fresh wieners from the branches … we could have an ‘ol nook together, TWICE as large! With that automatic egg-cracker from those TV ads!” His feet stop the both of them. “Whaddya say?”

Verne tears loose. "I- I can’t."

"Why not?" RJ investigates more tensely. 

Verne’s eyes draw themselves back to Stella’s out of the crowd, but can’t resist the sovereign glow of RJ. In both, he senses the past and future hours of the clock, and bends the arm by trying to break from the glass cover. And so, he loses his ability to finish a single sentence. “You wouldn’t understand what-! Because I-! It’s my-!”

A net gets shot.

Everyone jumps like insects, having flinched at the sound. An orange suit sounds the alert. From his black rubber boots up to the voltage-blue lens over his glasses, the Sniffer stands wide-legged behind them. To that, they left no words aside. Suddenly awakening their motive, there’s a coinciding set of strings, tied at their ends by one master, who erases the past from their minds. What happened the past few days became obsolete. Trapped underneath the crushing weight of his gaze, the Hedgies shiver all at once… but shiver together.

His elbow jutted out, Dwayne carries a new sack over his shoulder as a merry man, trapping just a squirrel and its drone - a traitor to him. Those bugs flail their legs within, to no concern meeting his grin. He backpedals to the street without fear more than dominance. Any attempted movements by the vermin who follow must confront the deadly force of an exterminator’s aim. He points the net gun between each animal that tiptoes further as he stakes his step in the middle of the street.

 “Look at you. Pelts. Scaaales . You folks think I get paid overtime , don’t ya?” With a crowd of animals up and ready to enclose on his boots, the situation contents to the techniques he found most riveting to perform before them: up close and personal. “ No , see… I’m a beast . Your stolen car keys only make me craaave . Rawr! RAWR!!”

His demonstration of a rabid monster knocks them back a foot and has them tripping over themselves. He takes up the chance to stomp ahead and push them back along the path they pushed him.

“When you feeeed me I get hungrieeerrrr …” he growls like the devil. “He-he-he-ha-ha-HAAAAAA!”

Right before the Sniffer feels prompted to choose a first target in the stalemate, and all before him cowering down, a street light from the side of the road bends over Ozzie in the center of their stage. The net gun lowers immediately. There comes an engaging performance to distract the wicked from the pure.

“‘Soft you’…” recites Ozzie. “...’a word or two before you go. I have done the state some service, and they know't.’”

“ Laaaame . Why’s the channel button broke?” Bucky keeps clicking the remote on him rigorously.

The parents hurry them off.

"’THEN MUST YOU SPEAK ’…" he cries. "...‘of one that loved NOT WISELY but too WELL’-!!"

“At least he’s conscious this time , honestly …” Heather snags onto RJ’s shoulder and plows him along with her. The popcorn cup he served himself nice and fresh drops out of his hands.

Dwayne ponders at the symphony of squeaks and squeals. His boots find themselves sticking to the pavement out of confusion. The opossum precisely paints a poignant performance of a lone death on a lone night. The street light’s glow diminishes in a woozy fall, as too does the dip between the corners of Dwayne’s lips.

Ozzie stabs himself with an invisible dagger right to the gut, spewing just-as-invisible blood. If no one knew better, he must ACTUALLY be dying at the moment.

“‘I KISS'D THEE… ERE I KILL'D THEE!! NO way but this!… My own life I take, to DDDIE… upon… a kiss.’ And so, the guilty Othello falls on the bed…” He collapses onto his side. The guilty Othello coughs and chokes horrifically, muscles in a state of seizure. “...and… dies.”

Ozzie is dead. No one else is there to watch, hidden away. At least Hammy claps from the bag.

“Hey-OOOOOOOOOO !” echoes the amplified voice of a teen back at the start of the street. “You ready for a SHOW TONIGHT!?”

“-NIGHT !?”

“-NIGHT!?”

A whistle blows from a set of fingers to accompany the announcement. With the vision of a hawk through his glasses, Dwayne detects a cluster of movement back down the length of the road, and finds the raccoon, opossum, and the triplet of porcupines, once again back in complete kahoots . Unanticipated, to say the least. They shared their slices of provoked pie now, rather than tossing them. They’re all pointed at his face. The winds shift abruptly, and blow the thin hairs on his head up in alert. He quickly slaps them back down into their place. They stick to his skull there only out of wariness and anticipation.

A level of upbeat rhythm comes into play. In a small strip of grass left between suburbia and the Hedge, Heather flicks her mic away and pulls far back on a large slingshot they had lodged into the ground behind the dead-end signs of the road’s end. The kids prepare to launch into action, packed onto the slingshot’s strap.

As Heather lets them fly, RJ twirls a bandana high. “WOOOOOO-HAA!!”

The kids are flung at once at Dwayne in the street, forcing his limbs into shaping himself as every letter of the alphabet simultaneously to dodge them. Once they’re away into the distance past him, they disappear from his focus.

“ABORT!” he cautions himself. “The PB’s slapped the J again. Take the squirrel!”

He turns around and starts to stomp back towards his truck further down the street. Those kids are nowhere to be seen.

Promptly, the Hedgies scatter out of the shadows of their hiding spots and pursue the Sniffer, possibly even jumping the gun as to their approach. RJ’s swift footing allows him to weave through the scrambled formation of the infantry. The trail he runs guides the pack into a more organized approach spanning the width of the road, like a charging herd of bulls setting sights on one red cape. 

Away from the trampling of the crowd, RJ takes an assessment on the Sniffer’s artillery - the net gun, the standard fare, is secured in his armpit, but there’s something… else . Some unidentified gun, black , and strapped onto the back of his orange suit, wobbles in an earthquake of hurried motion. The two silver prongs at the end make it look like some kind of cattle prod (or a marshmallow stick, as another option). RJ doesn’t care to analyze it, for he just keeps running, coming up beside Verne far in front of the others, ironically enough.

“This doesn’t change anything , in case you were betting on it ,” RJ specifically clarifies.

“It’ll change something if we don’t get Hammy back!”

"Truuueee that!"

Dwayne rummages through a pocket on the front of his jacket and collects a handful of tiny square chips, black as the night, and with a dark gray grid inside the center. "What a shocking performance."

He sprinkles two chip breadcrumbs behind him. They bounce with little clinks in front of RJ and Verne, and upon making contact with the pavement, they quickly expand into large squares of electricity blocking their path. RJ kicks the soles of his feet into the ground, scraping the skin, to save himself from an untimely electrocution. Verne does the same, and manages to prevent the heavy mass of his shell from tripping him forward. The sparks illuminating the floor surge in front of their faces, and make plasma orbs from their eyes. Two leaders, rendered paralyzed just as much as they would’ve been had they stepped in. They stare, hyper-focused on the other’s movements, or lack thereof, seemingly preventing the other from acting first in a new mental standoff.

The chess they play with their knees makes a stalemate out of every turn. When one lifts, the other stops them. Both lower right back to their starting positions, before the same occurs again, only applying different joints shifting at different angles. Nonetheless, the fields never dare to paint themselves with the blood they once did. The death trap in front of them becomes obsolete - they clearly weren’t making progress either way . 

Luckily, RJ and Verne also weren’t the only two capable of leading an army.

“Onward , friends!” Tiger’s pupils hiss in predator form. But they also roar in command, herding up the grazers of the land. “Go FORTH!! And have two take the flanks ! LET OUR CAUSE BE JUST!”

Stella jumps onto his back to ride through. “Forgettin’ someone?”

The opossums run side-by-side. “You can count on us to create the ambiance ,” Ozzie ensures,” From the… farthest distance possible .”

All the followers unite to pick up the slack, teaming up for a new field-day race around the remaining traps Dwayne tosses out as he nears the truck. Just as they expressed, Ozzie and Heather divert to either sidewalk around the action.

Dwayne flings open the door of the truck and barfs the net onto the passenger seat. He himself can’t take his leave just yet. Both couples - cat and skunk; porcupine and porcupine - encroach into the vicinity of the massive vehicle. Danger draws its radius. This metal prison before them held no dents, and not a single loose bolt. The truck proves to be a fortress far beyond the playgrounds they built.

His hunger grows. With the 4 animals cautiously circling him, Dwayne snaps the TazePro (Beta) from the sheath on his back to his grip and flicks it on with a finger. Finally, the whole enchilada’s served hot on the plate: Futuristic in style, it indeed holds the structure of a bulkier cattle prod, adapted into projectile form. From the barrel down to the trigger, it takes the appearance of a modified speargun, embedded with a loaded slot on the side for a short magazine already occupying the space. The double-A batteries inside supply all the juice the electric generator needs. Now, Dwayne dual-wields both elemental guns in his possession - net and lightning; catch and sting.

It’s clear to him they weren’t anticipating such a charged defense. That zapping energy supplied at the end of the TazePro (Beta), underneath the forked muzzle, captures their shaking gaze. “Oh this ? I’ll just say it’s like those things doctors use to numb the paaaain ,” he describes for them. “Minus the healthcare costs. And the numbing. But a lot more paaaain-”

Rattle .

His focus diverts by the rattling of mailboxes. From one street to another, 3 rows of mailboxes grid the perimeter of his truck, surrounding the left and right sides. No figures emerge from their dark entrances. But life hides in the narrow walls.

It’s clear he’s entered a defensive bout. He squints closer between them. Rattle , goes the left top box behind his truck. Rattle , goes the right bottom box ahead. The whiff of the closest animals strengthens by one fearful step. Quickly, he shoots 2 electric blasts at the road floor to fend the 4 off. But he keeps his net-loaded arm extended between the sidewalks. His eyes and ears work the mailboxes while his nose senses when the critters draw near. On both sides, the meddling middle boxes rattle, and the rest of the world deathly still. Left bottom , and right top. The feral scent fades away. And then, the mailbox pattern exposes its secrets. The rattles run up and down the road like an elevator. Every other tick, the ends meet on the middle floor - his truck’s own. So, he flicks the net gun between both middle boxes and launches nets to cling over them before they can rattle once more.

Ozzie and Heather ram their befuddled heads into the netted exits in their respective mailboxes, locked within.

“You’ve just been verminated ,” he whispers so boldly, like he’d waited 15 years for the opportunity.

Dwayne, standing there, his nose justified, finds no more animals in the outside air, apart from a squirrel’s scent within the truck. Based on the faded yet prominent state of the others, he suspects those 4 on foot fled the scene to cower at distances farther than his concern for the moment. Must’ve been a sensible reaction to his own intimidation.

Yet those same 4 nod to each other behind the cover of the Sniffer’s truck, bathing (and suffocating) themselves in car exhaust to keep their cover too smelly to breach.

Stella leans herself around the rigid corner to peek at the open passenger door. From this angle, a fraction of Hammy appears as an orange tuft of hair in a hardware store. While inside the net, he does attempt an escape, but the hunking drone keeps the net glued onto the seat, and doesn’t budge. The pattern of the wires is so tightly-knit that he can’t even find a fitting point to squeeze himself free either.

“We’re comin’, kid,” Stella sighs.

In their irises, the blue sparks of electricity leave RJ and Verne’s peripheral vision. The traps disabled themselves. RJ bolts up the street at the chance, leaving Verne to follow slowly in nothing more timely than an urgent trudge . RJ also takes the mistaken chance to glance back at the turtle, and divert himself from the traffic. Before he knows it, another tazing bolt from the Sniffer stabs into his ringed tail, just barely evading the fur of his hip. It spreads up his body and paralyzes him, far too tame for total electrocution. It only has enough voltage to distract his limbs from their functions temporarily.

Verne pulls ahead. Only a second gave him the room to do so. Another bolt zips for him, and he immediately ducks into his shell as a shield. The electricity circles him and pinches at his bare body from the inside out.

“Help.”

Dwayne inspects the empty area. The agitated opossums still attempt to get their puny little claws and puny little teeth to rip through the nets trapping them in the mailboxes, to no avail. He grins. He’s in his truck in a flash - in enough of a hurry to leave the shotgun door wide open. If only he hadn’t cracked his back when lunging to the driver’s seat.

In the man’s unexpected hindrance, Hammy notices some movement in front of his seat, underneath the boxy dashboard. Those white stripes do it for him.

“ Stellaaaaaa …”

Stella hushes him harshly.

“ STELLAAAAAA … DO YOU WANNA MEET MY ROBOT FRIEEEND ?”

His robot friend beeps mirthfully.

Just before Dwayne is able to recover from his inconvenient back issues, the front mirror vibrates and giggles. The smell plaguing the van becomes clear to his nose. Not just the squirrel. Or the car exhaust. He peers close at the bushy pricks sticking out of the mirror’s edge. 3 spiky kids flip it around to reveal themselves, pounding their fists together. Dwayne slowly draws up his night-vision glasses. Alas, the image is the same.

Zapping surges circulating RJ’s hairs come to a calm. His upper body teeters forward like melting clay, and he smacks the palm of one hand against the ground to keep himself up, though his limbs still jerk and shake violently and abruptly for a moment. His entire coat remains puffed out from the shock.

“RJJJ !” calls Heather.

On the left side of the street, Heather remains inside the mailbox. RJ races forward and pumps a pair of wire cutters from his bag to pass up to her on his way to the truck. Heather’s tail makes a meaty catch on the hefty tool and snaps a single wire of the net clean off. Her thin body didn’t need much space to slip out, clean as soap.

Make-believe thunder cracks. Ozzie summons forth a tempest that condenses the clouds of his might, sealed into a full-focused mind. From the crooked joints in his hands, he pulls in the strength of the outside winds to rattle the net covered over his own mailbox, in an attempt to combust it. His brow shoves his eyelids tightly against one another. He commands the thrusts of his arms, booming powerful force at the net, jerking violently in his concentration. A gust sweeps over the cone of his face. He thrusts them back forward again, and the volume of an inner fanfare grows, as does his power.

Tiger pounces onto the mailbox and claws the whole net off. Ozzie allows his eyes to re-immerse in the outcome of his psychic endeavor. Brushing the power off his palms, he nods in satisfaction at his performance. “Mmmmm-hmm.”

With the kids all giving him little, harmless punches to his neck and skull, Dwayne picks out the one on the top of his head and chucks it out the open door, irritated. A skunk appears on the dashboard, cocked to fire right onto his face.

“ Maaaan Heath'uh I’m so glad I saved this one,” Stella notes.

She unloads. Every inch of the interior fills by the first second. The blast packs so much punch it knocks the driver’s door open as well, making a clear end-to-end path for Tiger to leap through the front row of the truck through both doors, retrieving Hammy’s net in his teeth during his valiant act. The stench never fazed him. Landing stoutly on the pavement, he tears back on the framing in his jaw to free Hammy (and his robot friend).

“I am so jealous you can’t smell,” Hammy admits. “It sounds wonderful. Smells wonderful.”

"Gah. I'm sure you’ll get used to it someday. I’m quite sure."

Hammy sure does try his best to tolerate the dancing trash heaps in his nostrils with gritted teeth. “I REALLY… don’t think I WILL …”

Verne maintains a safe distance to be awestruck in. Despite such minimal communication, they seemed to have everything figured out. His open mouth, breathing deep and empty, absorbs the air that the animation of their actions brush onto him. He absorbs the proof through his eyes. Over an open field, all these winds make independent airways curving and twisting over the land, but never intersecting. Then again, the streams work as one unite at the coast of their objective - to keep their waters clear. And they fight to get there, flawlessly at that, while each member of the family performs their duties more flawlessly than the last, at least in comparison. They’re fighting for a friend now, but imagine what they’d do for the good of everyone …

Finally, RJ announces, "Clock’s struck Hedge hour! MOVE! GO!"

So it comes time to make like a tree and leave. Lou and Penny snag their kids (and plug their noses from the aftermath of what Stella smeared over them). Hammy darts right back to the Hedge, not giving a care for his companion no longer. The drone reactivates on its own and begins to float into the air beside the truck. RJ gives the opossums their moment to open fire on the machine with toy guns. Of course, a blue dart from Ozzie’s jams 1 of the 4 propellers before Heather’s red darts even have the time to experience the adrenaline of a close miss .

“So this is gonna be one of those ' THINGS ', isn't it?” Heather frowns.

The drone loses control among the stars it sought to reach and crashes onto the roof of the truck, propeller caught on an ear of the squishy white rabbit smiling underneath the giant hammer. There it struggles.

After coughing away the cloud, and the blue glasses blown off his face, Dwayne spots only the silhouette of the animals escaping down the street and slams on the gas… or, what should’ve been the gas. The WHOLE pedal had been detached and stolen by those freaks. His frown festers immensely.

RJ and Verne are nearly there by the time the others all make it past the dead end signs and into the Hedge, constantly glancing over. They look back before hearing the thump of a boot behind them.

“You vermin have a TRUE way of life, I’ll give ya that . Us middle-aged exterminators, y’know, we over complicate things! So how ‘bout we settle for something a little more…” The Sniffer now unveils the classical weaponry - the melee cattle prod - buzzing with electricity, and springs his aggression up to the moon. “... OLD SCHOOL!?!”

Without turning, RJ latches his hands onto Verne and flings him backward into the Hedge, backflipping himself to flee. 

Dwayne throws himself forward, submerging his head inside the Hedge. " Class dismissed ," he groans.

XXX

As things always do, their operations take the Hedgies back to the good old Log. All despite the indescribable, skanky odor surrounding them, the porcupine kids pay no mind while they surf aboard the salvaged gas pedal dug into the dirt. As it turns out, Lou and Penny endure the entirety of the price. Stella’s ready to outline the recovery process as follows: “Might wann’uh wash that out with soap . And tomato juice . And soap again . Have ‘em eat the soap bar after dat. Cleans ‘em from the inside while it goes. Gorge it down with sum tomato juice while you’re at it.”

RJ pants and pants, aimlessly trodding over the land, earthier than the lawns and laid over with the slick screen of night’s chilling air. His foot rams into the bulk of one hairy, flimsy mass. Hammy rests sound asleep in the grass already. It just so happens that everyone gathers around the two. Verne further treads into the scene.

So that’s how an ‘operation’ flows? It certainly lost its glory the moment they returned from the Hedge. A life was on the line. For one moment, all minds were correlated. Now, they express no harmony with another. Glances and frowns pass like a hot potato. No one holds blame, and yet they still manage to shift it anyway through the looks they throw. Among this, Verne makes it a moment to present himself before RJ as a fitting tribute to the shallow wake of midnight.

It’s not lugubrious like it’d unearthed the soil of sorrow or shame. Now boasting his chest out to RJ, Verne finds solid footing as the eagle over the battlefield. He refuses to display feigned celebration, considering the ordeal, and yet stands strong and sure in the face of the raccoon, and himself. “We shouldn’t have made our family fight…”

He glances around. Everyone nods back to him. In this resolution’s new slumber, at last earning a place to rest, Verne shares the drowsiness they all do at this hour. Fighting couldn’t be anywhere in their heads any longer. They simply lacked effort, lacked motive, and lacked the naivety and immaturity to accept such a conflict any longer. It’s hard to spot a single pair of eyes wide awake, as they need not strain for meaningless notions, any longer.

None of this pain meant anything. Did it?

“…and it was wrong . This whole week we’ve fought over NOTHING. That’s a whole week WASTED ! DOWN the drain! OFF the check!... Not coming back . You said 3 weeks, well now we’re down to 2 . That’s 2 weeks you’ve got left to figure out just what we’re here for. I guess we’re back right where we started this thing, just last week. We’ve ‘returned to our roots ’, you could say. We didn’t get anything outta this. None of us did. And don’t take my word for it - I’m just your tentative turtle … But I’m telling you, right back there … I’m sure our family just told you that they know how to fight these creatures now, RJ. Big thanks on that one. Because of you … they know how to fight for their home too . Whatcha give is whatcha get. Got that?”

Everyone remains silent. They stare.

XXX

Back in the suburbs, Dwayne returns to the truck and slams the door to debrief, the scent of skunk still lingering. Air isn’t punchable enough, unfortunately. In fact, not much of the truck’s interior technology could ever be punchable. So he almost punches himself to inject some thundering noise into the reticence that surrounded the area. 

Then, something else takes the brunt of the job. He hears the drone atop the roof, still stuck on the rabbit and desperately attempting to free itself. He sighs and rams a finger onto the hammer button near the wheel. The massive hammer of his figurine smashes onto the failed prototype drone once, rendering it immobile. Another smash cracks away its layer of protection. Out of his view, Dwayne’s grudging countenance flinches at a final, hideous smash, sending hail of plastic and hardware down outside the windows.

For the rest of the night all shifts by without belligerence. The sun awakes to take the moon’s place; not an inch overlaps, nor creates contest.

The giant scooper digs into the feral ground and unearths a hefty chunk of dirt at dawn. Verne slouches over the edge of the cliff, only watching the trees get torn from their roots right below him as the construction rounds the corner of the Hedge and onto their side. A train is something Verne can’t stop. A train exhausted the wastes of dilapidation that rose to his lower eyelids and made their form lost. Against his face, they drug its entirety down. Earth keeps ripping apart, grainy and fleshy if that’s what the average man saw, but the loss of such a foundation digs out a piece of his soul. 

The sounds of chainsaws drew him here. They’re revving through his brain. Oak trees and berry bushes. Who’s to say that scythe won’t slice the heads off more ? Pine trees. Shrub villages. Every flower, sparse in the place, torn out of the forest’s heart. Their teeth chew past any protestors. Its high growl deterred any who thought to join.

None of that matters , he tries to make himself believe. It works. Heartless it may be, but it works . His sights only draw the path from that dreaded red arrow to its destination. The Log is his patient, and him the doctor. A chronic diagnosis can’t ever hold him back. The tips of his fingers drizzle down his sides, exhausted from a futile dance with hope, undeniably mundane in its efforts. Intrinsic odors surpass the fashion on the face of a vase, and gray its shine. Just now those dull spots show. Verne enters an overseeing viewpoint of destruction, and compiles the air of the rubble in his lungs. Whatever level of personal and civil obligation they thought to be achieving with their actions, it simply couldn’t be possible that the span of dead land, and arid house frames, could ever- There he goes again. He shakes his head. What good did it do, when it didn’t matter ? He only made himself believe one thing did, and started from there.

So then there’s RJ parading from his hideout of bushes behind him, ruining the whole mood as he did oft. “Enjoying the view?” If he’s a patronizing hunter out for the last traces of Verne’s tolerant stability, consider him fed for the winter. It’s like he’d been stalking from the slope of the hill for hours, considering the (painfully) timely entrance.

Verne doesn’t flinch. “Shut up. Go away.”

RJ steps with both feet forward.

“Well you got the first part.”

“ Clear skiiies …” RJ details in admiration of this pristine day.

“Nope, you just lost it.”

“…the kinda breeze that makes your hairs all tingly …” He holds the demeanor of amendment; in his voice, there’s a jolly institution, gleaming from the face more than the soul, but absolute in intent. He tries to ameliorate the situation. “It’s a pretty fine day all things considered!”

“F-FINE ?!” chuckles the maniac. The bones in his neck crack when he snaps his head rigidly to him. That toothy, paranoid grin stretched far beyond his jawline. “Oh this's fiiine , this's great ! They're turning our bit of forest into a PARKING LOT so they've got more space to decide where to build MORE parking lots ! What's gonna happen if we back up !? They'll keep pushing us BACK and BACK and BACK AGAIN !! What would be the POINT!?!”

Continuing to approach, RJ scrunches every drop of desperate resolution into one pool on his face. His arms and hands stick wide out, and the top half of his body bends forward like the scrawny, impatient beast arising at the time being. “AHEM … hairy, tingly BREEZES ?…”

“I don’t have hair, I would be BUTT-NAKED without this shell, and my tail’s tingling more than any hair WOULD be!” RJ’s figure stands just a foot away. He stabs out at him. “And YOU sir are waltzing daaaangerously close into toe-stomping territory . Wanna relive some memories?”

Those thumb tacks now glued on RJ’s toes thirst from the threat. He wiggles those knives far sharper than Verne’s assertive finger. “Sadly for you, I’ve now entered counterattack mode!”

Verne backs down without a sound.

Having the authority to sneak up to his side, RJ cools his drift and speaks in comfort: “If it makes ya feel better… I’m always butt-naked.”

Verne quivers in his censor shell, contrasting from the blatant nudeness right beside him while he sits. “Somehow, you’re making me feel insecure.”

“Let’s go back to the Log,” RJ insists.

“You don’t govern me.”

“And you don’t govern me.”

Verne rises. “I didn’t say I governed you.”

“But you said you governed me so I said that YOU don’t govern ME!”

“But all I was saying was YOU DON’T GOVERN ME!”

“Which is why I MADE MY POINT!”

“Well NOW you gotta tell us who DOES GOVERN YOU!”

On this very fine day, RJ screams, “NO MAN GOVERNS ME BUT THE METEOROLOGIST!!”

Thanks to some random acorn that fell down to the edge of the cliff just a second ago, RJ has a football to punt into the horizon.

The first thing the acorn passes is the rusty hook of a crane. It flies farther, avoiding that obstacle, propelled as straight as a bullet, and hurdling over the curvature of the land. And down below, past the roofs of large portalets, it flies farther, and through the open doors of a bulldozer. It doesn’t grace the path or react to its moving pieces, and becomes one in itself, shining the low sun off its shell. Instead it skids past like a meteor, or a bullet train, until it closes in on that large man , a recurring figure, leading the construction. Under his boxy shoulders, under the bulk, ham, and hair of his arms, the sharp tip of the acorn bites onto the center of his pinkie finger.

“ OWIEEEEE !!” he wails. Contrary to the big guy's bigness, what the acorn bit of his pinkie frightened the whole hive of childish ineptitude cowering on the inside. “I’VE BEEN BIT ! MOMMY I’VE BEEN BIT!! I’VE BEEN-”

His tantrum takes him and his massive beard to spin around to the cliff, and he freezes. Up the face of the rocks, and dirt, and the grass carpet on top, something so dull brown and green drags him in. There’s nothing but a turtle. A turtle . Look at that hard, hollow shell, saving it from the revenge he now sought to deliver. The veins in his eyes grow red thorns. Look at its flat feet, stabilizing it against the ground he now thirsted to remove underneath. He restricts the muscles in his arms. Look at its crooked jaw…

He clenches two fat fingers tight around the circumference of that pinkie finger, the small hole dark reddish-pink, saturation lost in the drained presence of what memories lie before him:

~~~

In an empty room, too vague to make out, a toddler boy prances to seek some entertainment from the open top of a plastic bucket.

Toddler him waves his hand over the rim of the habitat, resting on top. “It’s an am-phibian.”

The tiny box turtle inside the pen slowly eases itself over and takes a chomp of his equally-tiny pinkie. Its mouth snags a hold of the tip, and doesn’t let go.

CHOMP.

“ AAAAAAA-!! ”

~~~

“Uhhh, Jack ? Mr. Jack Sawood, sir?” someone calls.

That trauma relived itself. Screaming carries on in his head. The screaming of a boy turned him into a man . He grew out of those tragedies the same way anyone grows out of their own beloved pants. His waist only grew, and with it, his anticipation for what old figure nature would put forth for his viewing.

“I KNEW I recognized you…” His bottom lip only quivers at the memory. On the high cliff, with the turtle high above him, Jack gazes up at the high rise of the armored demon. He tumbles over his thoughts. Chainsaws shred them to pieces. 

“Oh Velma , how you've grown … I've hated you as long as I can remember …”

Jack shakes his head out of it.

“Those critters wanna throw acorns at us and DOO doo in our portalets !” To Jerry, his closest, trustiest supervisor, the megaphone he shoves up blares no reservation nor restraint. “YOU KNOW WHAT I WANT?! I wanna CRUSH ‘em! CHOP ‘em down!! Snag their ears 'n RIP their heads RIGHT off their shoulders!! Quick, throw me some ideas!”

“Well, I- uh… I think-”

“Your ideas STINK !” Jack screeches. “Yer lucky I’ve smelled ideas worse than my dad’s cologne . One day, my parents left me alone in the toy section at the mall. Then , I got kidnapped ... by some hoser wearing a mouse suit. Unfortunately for him , he had to learn the burden of line passes ‘n dining reservations.”

“Well that’s-”

“Yeah, it was my uncle . He took me to DISNEY WORLD!! CALL ‘er in , Jerry.”

Mentioning HER existence stops the world from turning. Jerry, shaking like sticks in the wind, teeters his glasses to balance them over his eyes, shields his jittery face behind his clipboard, and pokes the brim of Jack’s megaphone away. “Y-y-you don’t mean… ‘ her ’, right?”

Jack adjusts his megaphone aim. That alone issues a quick phoning on Jerry’s part.

“ VELMA ,” Jack huffs to the cliff. “I hope yer sleeves are rolled up for a Goddamn Issue …”

RJ and Verne take no care to the ruckus down under.

“Do these people govern you?” Verne prompts further.

RJ pops a balloon of calm breath in his chest. “Only the meteorologist.”

“But THEY aren't meteorologists.” Circumstances so raw and unprocessed, unformed, start to squeeze out the soulless laughter a true lunatic strives for. “Am- Am I going BONKERS !?! Am I the ONLY ONE who sees the FLAW HERE!? If you run from them, you are LETTING them govern you!”

RJ steps back in the conversation for what he anticipated to be just a moment. “Alright, let’s call that an instinctive, comedic oversight-”

"A STUPIDLY instinctive comedic oversight, YES!!"

A hideous snap interrupts them from across the main road. Resorting to some primitive tactics to be sure, one worker slices their axe again into the stocky trunk of a pine - the tallest pine. Its true comparative height opened up to some debate, however, as what brothers it held close were no longer in sight. It’s the only kind left in its radius. And it’s the only kind to be tipping all the way over the flat concrete canyon in their direction on the cliff.

“AY !!” Jack shouts to the flipside. “Watch where ya let 'er FALL !”

Idle words don’t stop a timbering tree. The wooden tower collapses over the street and at the edge of their cliff, and at Verne all the same.. It’s the first time Verne ever truly lived on the edge. He stood his ground all morning… Weak courage doesn’t stop a timbering tree. He gasps as a snail in the face of its massive structure revealed at point-blank. Stray branches crumple and snap apart against the hill, flinging out sticks to smack RJ across the cheek. The trunk crashes onto the corner of the dirt in front of Verne’s stunned feet and knocks him over the edge before making a deathbed of the ground below and demolishing an unfortunate portalet in the process, all while cueing the irascible honk of a car blocked from passing the giant log, lying on the street.

RJ lunges out to grab Verne’s hand before the turtle himself timbers into the pit of construction. RJ holds tight while bent over the cliff, his single, unsupported arm shaking. Verne dangles, and dangles more.

In his eyes, RJ sees the story of the misguided. Misguided in his thinking. Misguided in his priorities. These thoughts don’t opaque themselves in what a heart-pounding moment it was, but the notion is there. There’s no way this couldn’t make sense to him. A warrior runs around Verne’s irises. A naked warrior, stripped of all weaponry and motive. Never it showed itself, and now it makes its awkward presence a million times more bewildering to consider.

RJ’s fingers become sore, and begin to slip. He doesn’t let them act just yet.

In his eyes, Verne sees the story of the mistaken. Mistaken in his values. Mistaken in his philosophies. The tree leaves that sway and chatter more skeptically over the cliff in the itching breezes provided more cover than the lifeless blue void staring into him. Does he know who he is? He gives a charity, betrays a charity, accepts a charity, and is now willing to throw the funding of their family away. The little scrunch of his nose seemed like it could throw him away too.

Verne clenches his teeth harder on the accord of RJ’s own pressure - the lifevest keeping him afloat for the very first time all week. 

“You are not like Verne,” RJ frowns.

“You are not like RJ,” Verne frowns.

Another, newly emerging chainsaw reminds Verne of his purpose in this place, and his head shoots down to the corpse of the pine tree miles below him. His open mouth ventilates all the spare air it can get to replenish the withering of his hope. Though it serves to very grudgingly reassure him that the straining moisture forming against the hand locked around his still hangs on. 

The fate of Verne’s morning rests with RJ . The construction site acts as merely a portrait in their verbal conflict - like the painted land beyond an impassable river, out of reach but animated and full. They’d argue over a painting. So what would it be like to be in the painting? RJ looks at the hum, whir, and buzz of the heavy machinery taking action nearby. He looks at Verne. He scrunches his face back hard after finding the bridge over the river - the drop.

What pained tone RJ manages to generate for himself inexplicably defines its intent to Verne, the droop in his countenance mixed in the pot, and suctions out the deepest lumped clutches accumulating in the cavern lying down his throat. Genuine . Nothing else could be done. Pictures look but don’t feel . Words listen . Reality swoops in to pinch at all the senses, tying the strings of logic in an unbreakable, harrowing loop, separate from the perception of the mind, down to a raw ore .

That reality weighs down RJ’s efforts to begin a final judgement: “Verne… I think the best way to meet minds here…”

Verne can feel RJ’s fingers begin to loosen. His heart stops.

“...is to let ya think about it.” 

The sharp shot puts him down. RJ releases his hand without aggression but regret, more comparable to the surrendering of an old toy.

Verne watches him leave down the tunnel of his sight, to never return. He clings onto the dirt and rock of the cliff face and slides down (a bit more) safely. He lands on top of the fallen pine, on the side of the construction activity. Unfortunately, being confined to the collateral coast can’t hide him from the waves at sea.

His tail starts tingling immediately. Not just that, it rattles underneath him. The diffident attendance to the danger glows and rings through his nerves. Like the noise of a dead space it pulls out the sounds only ever meant to fill an auditory absence, puked into the crowd of hollers and busywork storming the area. It hums. It whirs. It buzzes. The loud clouds surround him as he grips the cliff helplessly with all the traction he has on the back of his arms. Whenever they start to slip, he throws them back harder against it. Harder . His tail tells him that another step means death . But he’s alive , and doomed to be so. RJ dropped him far enough away from the actual operations, he knew, but it's as if lightning anywhere in the field meant danger for every inch .

He squeezes tight on his tail. It just doesn’t stop.

Sawdust enters Verne's throat, forcing him to cough. Unbearable enough, he stuffs his head into his shell and sits blind to the danger. His own breaths replace the ringing when tucked inside a brown brick pillow - a solid comforter of the situation. It’s only a shell , then again. Hollow. Unprotected itself , protecting those within .

An inclining rumble through the sky causes his tail to surpass even the boundary he placed against it. The memories tingle.

A young voice pleads to him, “ ‘Can- can we go in the Log now, Verne? That earthquake’s scar-wy.’ ”

Earthquake ? Verne’s conscience answers the call and scouts the land outside his shell. The first thing it sees for itself is an airplane in the sky, generating such familiar rumbling.

“That- that was an airplane ,” he gasps low at the long-unresolved realization, unimpressed. “Wait. Are you kidding me? That was an AIRPLANE THAT DAY !? DECADES ago?! They’ve ALWAYS BEEN HERE ! We’ve never been FREE !”

“‘We’ve allll already put our berries in there for you, Verne!” the same being sings. “Just like you asked! They’ll be saaafe!’”

"We’re never gonna be safe anymore…"

He feels as though the bulldozers already ran him over. A wrecking ball could smash him into the cliff, but he’d already be dead by then. Let’s see, how many ways could he die here, living on the edge again, somehow? Wrecking ball, bulldozer, explosive bowel movements combusting a portalet on top of him-

Certainly not an acorn . All the way from the top of the cliff, another random acorn from the trees falls onto his head, maybe from the vibrations of truck engines larger than Earth. He catches it in his palm after it bounces off. Not even safe from an acorn . His eyes grow wide, and new intent fills his pumping heart. He’s not safe here. Never will be. Even from the tiny impacts of what he fears. Perhaps the best way to face fears is to not face them at all. To accept them, and respect them. That’s what RJ would say, apparently, he believes.

“So,” Jack proclaims around the site. “We gonna REMOVE this feller or NOT?!”

Verne picks himself up off the feller and flees in a hurry.

RJ spies lifelessly from the forest hill like a watchdog taking post all night. Once he spots Verne, back safe and nearly traumatized along the Hedge, he escapes without a trace, at the paint he just smeared over the guy’s head. He’d waited to see that paint return to him, complete.

XXX

Verne takes himself as fast as he can to the calendar, at the forgotten bulletin board of the site, and checks it. All his movements are still just as panicked as when he escaped, and the tension just as high. He scans the calendar, then coming to notice that there’s not much left on the bulletin board entirely OTHER than this utter timebomb of a reminder. And the map. That dreadful map. It desires no attention from Verne’s mind, yet another force does.

“ ‘ Think about it ’… ” RJ’s voice echoes.

“No no no, shut up figment RJ!”

“ ‘That’s a red arrow of DEATH . Which we could avoid if we just did the LOGICAL thing…’ ”

“I HAVE to fight this fight! I don’t wanna! But I-I-”

The raccoon shows himself. Just like a happy cartoon, he bounces out of the 25th square, marked ‘Heather’s B-day’ with an ‘18’ written in a balloon, and introduces this alternate mental plane consuming all of Verne’s consciousness.

“Hey hey hey!” little RJ waves.

Verne’s aching stalls. Just a figment of his face taunts him, but terrifies him likewise. His shape outlined itself as a glaring threat to him now. The spikes hairs from the raccoon’s fur cringe him back from the hallucination, but don’t let his eyes go, no matter how far he tilts his neck.

" Biiiiiig part-ayyy comin’ up! That’s French for ‘party’. This boat’s party sails point towards happy trails-!"

Verne shoves a hand onto the page to mute him. Once he removes it, he’s gone.

“ Oooooh boy…” When his troubles are too great, and eyebrows too tense, the only thing left to do is pretend he’s completely okay. “Aha! That’s what I need, RRRIGHT Verne? Let’s get some- yeah, let’s just get some alone time.”

Alone time it is. Only issue being, RJ’s fortress still looms over the comforting lake, and soft, light willow on the other side. He looks both ways before tiptoeing out of his fort and through the scene. The entire site remains deathly silent. If anyone were here, to which he showed no interest at the time, they weren’t making their presence known. Before he can consult the nurturing arms of the willow tree, he also happened to enter the view of what lay past the boundaries of RJ’s fort. Around the corner of the pile, and the cooler RJ must’ve claimed for himself, through the bushes and hidden behind it all, is a vacant TV set . Completely vacant, abandoned for once as a dead landscape of anarchy. The TV drowned itself in static, reflecting its dull mess onto the purple throne facing it. Two rear-formed sunken indents are left on the seat, raccoon and possum-shaped. Empty . Like a ghost town. He can imagine them there, just a few days ago. But that’s all he can do now. Imagine. The heart of the family isn’t beating, is it?

“We NEED to be under one lock again,” he repeats.

Verne releases a pained breath, and comes back to peering up the height of RJ’s fort over the pond, and the single can of Spuddies on top. Something hits him: Mt. Feeds-a-lot is gone as he knows it. The wealth of that community stash transferred onto their secluded forts. An overwhelming rush of disbelief and illness forces him back around and wipes his agenda clear from his mind. He hurries his feet through the grass back to the Log. He shakes his head vigorously on the way, brushing burning emotions off his aching head.

Time passes, and he’s now tame once again.

“I know I couldn’t have saved all of them,” Verne acknowledges to the Log. “But I saved you .”

He puts his hand on it gently so as to not damage it further. The earthy texture cracked through his fingers brings comfort to his posture. His shoulders lower.

"I am gonna protect this home," he smiles. "Mark… my… shell …"

Violent rustling comes from the Hedge. Team RPS parades out, carrying along the uninterested remains of Verne’s own group, short of one leader for the morning. What RJ’s carrying with him isn’t food, or anything for that matter, but Heather and Hammy pass through wheeling that flipchart… that flipchart … with its compelling stupidity diagrams. He returned to the roots of his argument, and out of Verne’s control, that might’ve just tempered him more over the issue.

Yes. Back to their roots.

“I am gonna kill that raccoon,” he breathes.