“Noooo!” wailed Ripples. “He can’t have! He can’t have gone to ol’ Frog-head!”
“She’ll eat him! Eat him!” echoed Twinkles.
“I think that the insect people understand what I said,” Rocky said blandly.
“Great. So now what do we do?” asked Taylor.
“Do you know what happened in the meeting?” asked Walker.
Rocky shook his head.
“They were in there for hours. Our mole could only say that they had a few arguments, of which nothing of value was said – mostly threatening. They probably said the interesting things during the quiet parts – too quiet for our mole to learn anything.”
“Is he still there?” asked Nate.
“No, he’s moved on. And Gretel’s moved on too, but he didn’t know where. He thinks they were planning on having another meeting later on. He’s going to keep an eye on the matter, of course, but…” Rocky shrugged.
Ripples took that moment to fly down to Jessica, grab her collar and pull frantically:
“We must bring him back from the dark side!”
“We know Ripples. We will.”
“Good! ‘Cause otherwise Ikey will end up wearing black all the time and hiding behind a dark mask always and always and if it ever got taken off then he would die!”
“Zac?”
“Yes Jess?”
“Have you been exposing the insect people to Star Wars?”
“Umm, well, yes. But this is hardly the time to discuss their exposure to pop culture.”
“Ahem,” Taylor cut in. “And have you guys got any ideas on how to catch Ike if we can ever catch up with them?”
“How do you catch someone who’s telepathic, telekinetic, can shapeshift, and has force fields?” Trinity asked. “We’ve been asking ourselves the same question. Frankly we think you’re our best bet.”
“Me?” Taylor repeated, surprised.
“You. And Jessica. You’re probably the best empaths on the planet.”
“Well, Jessi’s better than me.”
“Be that as it may, empathy is the most likely thing to get through to him. We can’t physically attack him. Or telepathically, because I know he can create telepathic force fields.”
“Well… he can’t block my probes,” Taylor pointed out.
“Well, there you go,” Trinity said. “We… you… can work with that. Basically, we’ll try to find him, and when we do, it’ll be up to you guys to hold him.”
“Then what? We can’t hold him forever. We need to be able to restore him and Carla back to how they were,” Jessica pointed out.
“Zac was the one who did it,” Rocky pointed out.
Everyone looked at him.
“If we can get Isaac and Carla to merge, maybe I’ll be able to zap them back together again,” Zac conceded. “But we need them to merge!”
Whatever anyone was going to say in reply was interrupted by someone new teleporting into the room.
The Goblin.