I hung about for more than two weeks with the desire to write, the inspiration to write, an exact knowledge of what I would write, and a receptive audience (of one, anyway). I spent this time doing schoolwork, mourning the speediness of time, grumbling about all the things I had to do, and going shopping for chocolate. And then, because this is after all one of those all-powerful Ski Lodges (*impressive silence*), I hopped into a time machine and went all the way back to Day 3 for the convenience of my audience-of-one. Also so that I could forget that I had been doing all these very un-Prince-like things and hopefully Finior wouldn't notice.

Day 3, Part 1

Everyone stumbled down to breakfast the next
morning with about seven minutes of sleep to their name. This time, thank goodness, I
was already in the dining room when the various Chatterbox people came
down, though Lord Finior was nowhere to be seen. Dragonfly was one of
the last ones, having attempted to morph into the Sleeping Beauty and
not having managed it. "Morning, all," she said, sitting down at her
place at the table, except that the chair decided that that was it it was not
in life to be sat upon, and also it wanted to show solidarity for Crescent, and went on strike.

"Great," Dragonfly groaned as rainswept and Oro and I extricated her. "Do I sit on the table? Or is that cross too?"

"Sorry,
dude," I said apologetically. "Not quite the morning greeting I was
planning. Seriously, this is not sarcastic. All cool?"

"Not
exactly," Dragonfly thought aloud, "but heck, I'm not on the floor
anymore, so I guess that's a plus." She shot a look at me; it didn't
seem quite believable that just last night I'd been in a major argument
with an unseen King/dad.

"Maybe you could take Lord Finior's," Hawkstar suggested. "Since he's not here."

"Good
idea," Dragonfly said, taking it, but sitting down extremely gently in
case it was also cross. (It wasn't.) "So, how's everyone?" She was
saying it mostly so that I would answer; she knew how the others were.
Crescent had come in even later than her, and looked to
be on exactly 0% battery.

No one said "Terrible because come on
how obvious is it that Kauri's not here"; maybe they were still a bit
frightened from last night's occurrence. Dragonfly definitely wasn't
going to say anything of the sort. There was silence for a moment - no
one wanted to say anything, in fact - and then, as usual, I forbearingly took it upon myself to smooth things over.

"I'm
pretty good," I said cheerfully. "What do you guys want to do today?
There are still a lot of activities planned, but if you'd like to chill,
that's cool too."

"Yeah, well, chilling is cool right," Oro said sarcastically.

Whoa, no one was in a good mood.

On
the other hand, could you expect people to be in good moods when their
friends/partners had just vanished and you didn't know why or if it
might happen to you as well? Crescent hadn't admitted it, but Dragonfly
suspected she was still afraid that Kauri was just gone forever.

"Um, yeah, I think we'd like to chill," Rigel added tiredly. "I didn't sleep that well last night."

"Okay, yeah, that's fine," I said. "You guys are in charge here." Oh sUrE,
Dragonfly couldn't help thinking. Which wasn't manners, I have to say.
"So... if you change your minds, just tell me? I'll be around. Explore
the Palace, listen to its music, whatev. I don't think you've completely
depleted the library yet, amiright?"

Had this dude seriously
been in a raging argument a few hours ago? Dragonfly knew that the
answer was yes, but even so... She glanced around the table. Why was
everyone else here anyway? Could she really trust any of them? What if
the answer to that was yes too...?

Dragonfly, you're being too morbid. Nothing's wrong.
Except that an AE was missing and her host had gotten in a raging
argument with her host's father, but honestly, wasn't that stuff kind of
trivial? Which was meant to be sarcastic; she hoped that time wouldn't
make it true.

Also, too many question marks.

I had waved to
them and left, and now the others were just sitting in silence around
the table over the ruins of breakfast, as sunlight flickered, full of
promise, over them and up the wall opposite. Empty promises, it would seem.
Dragonfly half-shivered and looked up. "So how do we chill?" she asked.

No one answered.

Finally
Rigel gave a little shake of her head. "Look, we have to do something,"
she said. "Maybe that whole thing with Kauri was a freak accident.
Maybe the Prince doesn't even notice anyone's missing. Maybe we all just
dreamed that thing last night."

It felt probable that they had, somehow. "No," Crescent said stubbornly. "We all heard it, right?"

A few heads nodded.

"Also,"
Hawkstar said, leaning forward, "can we trust each other? I don't like
what happened with Kauri. I mean, whatever did happen. Let's just
promise that we're together."

Good idea. "... I promise,"
Dragonfly said quietly. "I'm with anyone who's right, who's ready to
help everyone else and wants to keep anyone else from disappearing.
[Complicated wording, Dragonfly, complicated wording.] We're with each other, right?"

"Yeah," said rainswept, looking
straight into her eyes. The others all promised too - not one of them
wriggled out of it, Dragonfly noticed.

"And there's one more
thing," she added. "I'm not sure that we can trust the Prince." She
thought about him (sorry, me) - arrogant, self-centered, maybe not
really caring about them at all, or maybe caring too much. "He might even have staged this whole thing just to make us think that he's with us."

"Are we really saying this kind of thing in his own palace?" Hawkstar enquired. "You do know that it's probably listening, right? Maybe we should have agreed to go somewhere."

Oro sighed. "Regardless of which, we didn't," he pointed out. "And so maybe this is never going to happen again. Maybe we can just relax. The Prince seems nice, right?"

"Seems," Hawkstar agreed darkly.

This wasn't going anywhere. "So how do we chill?" Dragonfly repeated. "I'd vote for the library." And hopefully not investigating the secret passage from last night. Somehow, she felt certain that it was better if they forgot about it. If they didn't look for trouble, maybe trouble wouldn't come looking for them. Who knew what Kauri had been doing last night?

Luckily, no one seemed to think of going back. "Sounds good," Crescent said with a sigh that could have been imagined, and they started drifting out of the dining room.