“Sorry for the horror show,” she sez, puttin’ away her disguise mirror after takin’ one last peek, as if to see whether things have changed since the last time she looked, “but it’s been a rough assignment so far.”
“What … What happened to you?” I sez, findin’ my voice at last. “Who did this to you?”
I mean, we had all known there might be some trouble associated with this mission, but nobody likes to see a beautiful skirt get worked over.
“Would you believe it was our own team?” she sez, flashin’ a quick smile, though I knew it hurt. “Come again?”
“The hair is courtesy of Gleep,” she explained. “I guess it was an accident. I must have gotten between him and dinner or something. Anyway, it’s not as bad as it looks … or could have been, Chumley saw it coming even if I didn’t and got me out of the way of the worst of it … which is both where the bruise came from and why I’m not complaining about it. Honestly, you should see what happened to the wall that was behind me at the time.”
“Speakin’ of which, where are Chumley and Gleep?”
For the first time in our conversation, Tananda starts lookin” uncomfortable.
“They’ve … ah … headed back to Big Julie’s. Actually, big brother’s in a bit worse shape than I am, so rather than have him trying to work with his arm in a sling, I told him to take Gleep somewhere out of the action and stay with him for awhile. Ifs funny, you know? I still can’t figure what set Gleep off … but until we can get a handle on it, I figure he’s more of a danger than a help on this assignment. Anyway, I decided to stay on and use this disguise gizmo to see if I could do anything to help the cause on my own. I sure couldn’t do much worse than we were doing as a team.”