Chapter Six

Chapter Six

Flopsy was not happy.

The elder archetypes, in their infinite wisdom (she thought to herself sarcastically), had seen fit to send her a miserable excuse for a rabbit. His name was Earry, and his name was just as frightfully accurate as she had feared. He did have very long ears, and he did seem to hear everything that anyone said in his vicinity whether or not it was intended for his ears, so she supposed that at least might make him useful at some point. It had also already made him a huge pain in her fluffy tail, she thought, as her nose twitched in remembered annoyance. Harey and Hopert had mentioned Alfalfa's disappearance in a quiet voice before Earry had even joined them, and no one had been close enough to hear them. Even among a group of large-eared rabbits. Flopsy only knew what they had been discussing because she had been watching their body language absentmindedly and Harey had made the same twitch of his left ear that he always did when discussing Alf – something that had originated early in their time as a team, when Alf had been convinced that letting one ear flop while the other stood tall was somehow fashionable. He had since gotten over that, thank goodness, but Harey had kept the ear twitch.

Earry had no similar excuse for knowing Harey's movements. He had shown up, Flopsy's eye noticing him for his purposeful movements in their direction – bunnies rarely moved in that sort of straight beeline; they tended to sidetrack far too easily. He had been quite far away when the boys had fallen silent. She remembered wondering if they were plotting some sort of prank for when next they saw Alfalfa and had thought about reminding them that something bad might have happened to him already – but they knew better than to pull a prank in an inappropriate situation. While she disapproved of most of their jokes, she could not fault their sense of timing. They had yet to pull something on her, and they had yet to pull something which either pissed her off or which got her in trouble. Besides, she had no proof they were thinking up pranks. So she had said nothing.

Not so for the new kid. He had beelined towards their group, and Flopsy had assumed he was either the new bunny assigned to their team or a rabbit sent to inform her where to find him. After watching his rather erratic hopping methods – while Earry had traveled in a nearly straight line, his pace and the length of his hops had been all over the place – she hoped for the latter case, and waited for him to introduce himself to her.

And he had hopped insolently right past her, despite her obvious stature as the group leader, and asked Harey and Hopert what about Alfalfa had them so worried. Wasn't the other rabbit a big bunny? Couldn't he take care of himself?

Flopsy realized her ears, normally as relaxed as her name, had tensed fully straight as her thoughts bared the seething anger underneath.

Surely the elder archetypes had informed Earry of the situation with Alfalfa. Surely any other rabbit would have had the social grace to leave the situation alone, or least to wait until he was included in a discussion over how to deal with Alfalfa's disappearance. Failing that, surely any other rabbit would have found a way to bring up his knowledge without making explicitly clear his contempt for their concern over their lost comrade and his disdain at the thought of a rabbit who was unable to take care of himself.

Flopsy wrinkled her nose up tight, bunched her legs under her, and forced herself to stay still. The longer she remained tightly coiled, the better it would feel when she allowed herself release. She took a slow and careful breath, suddenly reminded of the first creative energy she had ever tasted – that of a yoga practitioner who used yin classes as inspiration for his haiku poetry – released it just as slowly and carefully, then leapt as far forward as she could, releasing her limbs in a far more mobile and energetic method than would ever occur in a yin class, but it worked for her.

She didn't have to be happy with the newcomer to her team. She didn't have to think of him as a member of her team. She just had to work with him.

Thankfully she didn't have to work too closely with him just yet, she thought. They were working as back-up on the West coast of Canada, and almost all the teams here were quite inexperienced. Even the few experienced rabbits scattered amongst the teams in her zone lacked significantly in both initiative and foresight, so she had her group operating independently, checking to make sure none of the novelists were getting wise to what was happening. It wasn't exactly what they were supposed to be doing, according to the initial mission, but Flopsy was more than willing to exercise her own initiative in order to promote the success of the mission. This was the sort of thing which had gained her the positive attention of the elder archetypes, and she figured it was the sort of thing she needed to keep doing if she wanted to remain in their good books despite the issue with Alf.

Flopsy and her team had already discovered rather appalling methodologies, as they had discussed in their first quick meeting halfway through the first day, and Flopsy sighed mentally. Rabbits were just fine at following directions while they remembered them, but they did rather tend to remember the bits that they wanted to remember, and which would enable them to get fed. The groups she had seen so far had tended to crowd in at the write-ins and slack off a bit when the novelists were doing their own individual writing. This last wasn't too bad – it meant that the writers were getting some work done without getting too suspicious, because the rabbits had at least followed enough instructions to find someone working on a piece just slightly outside their own narratives, but they also seemed to have settled into that. For the elder archetypes' plan to work, the bunnies would need to keep up the long-term involvement, but also throw in a few ideas that would throw the novelists for a loop. Flopsy didn't mind if they took a few days to do that, but so far they had only been doing it at write-ins, and seemed to have no plans to change that idea.

More worrying were the write-ins themselves.

Flopsy had been to two, so far, but from those and the other plot bunnies she had talked to, it seemed that all the groups were making the same mistake: they were treating the write-ins like some sort of sampling session. She had managed to straighten out the bunnies with which she had spoken so far, and she smiled, her tail twitching with her sudden happiness, at the thought that their ears would still been burning with her anger.

Of course, they were bunnies, so they might be over it already and back to their comfortable ways. But she could hope, she thought. Perhaps one or two among them had managed to choose creative souls as intelligent as the ones on which she herself had feasted and might have a brain cell or two to actually understand the rationale behind Flopsy's words.

But if they had, they would more than likely be a member of a team like hers.

Oh well, she sighed to herself. She just had to check in with the leaders of two Vancouver teams before she could meet up with the rest of her team and get more of a sense of what things were like in her zone. Maybe one of the others would even have heard something about Alfalfa.



While in the more widely spaced groups, where there were no write-ins because the novelists were simply too far apart, Flopsy and her team visited each plot bunny at his or her primary target's location, the plan said that the leader of each group would meet her in the regional write-in location. Flopsy could tell something wasn't quite right as soon as she arrived in the back room of the small coffee shop where several Vancouver novelists had met not long before.

For one thing, there were two plot bunnies waiting for her, not the one she had expected. For another, one of them was Earry.

But what had her ears stiffening was the faint echo of Alfalfa that she could barely pick up.

Not that she had time to think about it.

“Christie?” she asked the small black-and-white spotted rabbit seated on the table. “I'm Flopsy.”

The rabbit crouched respectfully, but not too deeply. “Yes ma'am,” she said.

Flopsy glanced at Earry. “Hello, Earry.” She would be polite and avoid asking him his business here. Especially since it was annoying her, and that always decreased her hearing ability. She needed to check out the sense of Alfalfa before it faded too much for her to hear. While Earry could probably have detected it much longer than she herself could, she not only had no desire to ask him to, but she also doubted he would know what to check for. As far as she knew, he had never met Alfalfa, never gained the affinity that she herself had from working with him for so long. She turned back to Christie. “One moment before you report, please.”

“Yes ma'am,” the rabbit repeated, this time with a deeper crouch, but Flopsy was no longer looking at her.

Flopsy had her eyes closed, and as she focused on her hearing, her ears stiffened to their full height. Over there, she thought, following the sound into a chair to the right of the door through which she supposed the humans must have come. She herself had just hopped through the wall, but humans had a lot more faith in the laws of physics than any plot bunny had ever cared to cultivate.

That was odd. There were no words in what she could hear. Just an undeniable tone of voice, slightly flippant, slightly serious, surprisingly worried... infinitely desirable. Not that she would ever let him know. She may be a rabbit, but she had never felt the rabbit's urge to multiply. Not even with Alf. Flopsy shivered inwardly. Time to focus on what Alfalfa felt, not on what she felt.

From this chair, she could tell that there was something more that she had missed.

Flopsy hopped one chair over. This sound was an older echo, tinged with curiousity but none of the worry she had heard from the newer source. It was too old for her to sense anything more. In fact, from the sound of it, it must have been from before Flopsy had last seen Alf.

Neither of the sounds were strong enough for Alfalfa to actually have been in the room, but by the taste of the sound – whatever that meant, Flopsy thought – he had had a brain carrot of two of the people in the room. She opened her eyes. She wasn't going to learn anything else from sitting with her ears open.

“Alright, Christie,” Flopsy said, hopping back up to the tabletop. “How has it been so far?”

“I'd like to see it's been going well, ma'am,” Christie said, crouching and gazing down. “But while the humans seemed to be placated by the end of the write-in, I let my team move around too much during the early part of the write-in.” Christie looked up again, gazing frankly at Flopsy. “One of them suggested that the problems they were having as a group might be because of plot bunnies, ma'am.”

“They guessed that it was plot bunnies?” Flopsy asked, surprised. None of the writers in any of the other groups had come anywhere close to that point, although some of them had expressed curiousity at how similar the difficulties were that each of them had been having. Some of the rabbits had been amused – amused! Flopsy thought with another angry thought – that the humans had been comparing notes and finding patterns. Stupid bunnies. Not Christie, though, she realised thoughtfully, suddenly calm again. That was almost as surprising as the realisation the humans had come to.

“Yes ma'am,” Christie said. “They argued about it, and some of them seemed convinced that the idea was wrong, while others were willing to entertain the idea. It sounded like there were other incidents with rabbits which had helped them reach the idea of plot bunnies, but the skeptical ones disbelieved them. They all seemed to accept that the first half had been abnormal after we settled down for the second half, though.”

“Very good, Christie,” Flopsy said sincerely. “I think you're the first group leader I've met so far who has actually had the initiative to get her team to back down a bit at a write-in.”

“Thank you, ma'am,” Christie said, crouching briefly.

“I'll be in touch after your next write-in, Christie, but if anything more happens, my team and I will be meeting in Vancouver daily after this. We'll be in the ferry terminal from 11 to 12pm.” Flopsy hesitated. With any of the other leaders, she wouldn't say anything. But Christie seemed to have a brain between her rather fetching ears, black but for one white patch at the tip of her right ear.

“Another thing, Christie...” Flopsy said. “The two novelists who had been sitting in the chairs I sat in at the start. Do you remember anything about them?”

Christie twitched her right ear to the right and then back to the left in a fairly common plot bunny thinking gesture. “I didn't taste either of them,” she said finally. “I'm more of a romance type, so one of the others was my primary, over here,” she twitched her ears to the opposite side of the table. “Neither of the two you're interested in was the one who suggested the plot bunny idea, that was a different one... One of the two was new, started fresh tonight. They were related, somehow.” Her right ear twitched again. “Sorry, ma'am, I don't remember anything else about them.”

“Thank you, Christie,” said Flopsy. “If you notice anything strange about either one, however small it may seem, please come that night to the ferry terminal and tell me. It's important.”

“Yes, ma'am,” the black-and-white rabbit crouched again.

“That's all, then. I'll see you in a few days.”

Flopsy turned to Earry but waited while Christie disappeared out the door before speaking.

But before she could say anything, Earry spoke.

"You seem to like her," the neutrality of his tone spoke volumes about his disdain. Well, too bad for him he was not the team leader. Even though she knew he was likely reporting on her behaviour to the greys, Flopsy simply could not bring herself to care overly much about his opinion of her or her actions or whom she liked. Surely the elder archetypes would consider the content of his reports as well as the tone in which the reports were given...

"She has more guts than most of the bunnies I've dealt with today. Their brains might have been mixed up with their tails for all the problems they came close to causing our mission on its very first day," she said, ears flicking in remembered annoyance.

"True, but you also like her," he persisted.

"Sure," she said. "What I've seen of her so far I like well enough."

Earry flipped his ears at her, but whether in annoyance or acceptance Flopsy did not yet know him enough to recognise. "Regardless," he said, "the likable Christie was right. The two who sat in the chairs in which you had such an interest were relatives. The older one was the one with the previous experience with rabbits. She pushed this group until one of the others suggested plot bunnies."

"How do you know?" Flopsy asked. Surely he hadn't skipped one of his assigned meetings in order to partake in this one.

"These," Earry said, flipping his ears. "Echoes get trapped in spaces like this. I got here soon enough after the meeting that I could hear her say it, clear as a whistle."

She wouldn't ask him about his meetings. That could wait until the group was together for its planned debrief. She would not have him know how little she trusted him... or at least, she thought, she would not confirm what the annoying little rabbit probably already suspected. An arrogant sort like him was probably paranoid as well as a loner... Flopsy nodded, bringing her mind to task. His ears. Of course. Well, she had thought they might prove useful.

"What piqued your interest in those two in particular?" Earry asked. "I'd have expected that one," his expressive right ear pointed to a chair two to the right of the pair she had asked about.

"Why that one?" Flopsy asked, curious. Perhaps those ears had heard something else useful.

"The one sitting there both came up with the idea of plot bunnies and mentioned he had written an army of them."

"He did what?" Flopsy exclaimed. That was far more serious than what Christie had told her - although that was bad enough. But perhaps Christie was too young to know what had brought about the plot kitties.

Earry had nodded.

"Any other interesting tidbits that you overheard?" Earry shook his head. "Good. We need the team assembled now," Flopsy told him. "Bring them here. I have one final meeting, but I'll be back here in an hour, tops." And without waiting for Earry's reaction, Flopsy hopped through the wall on her way to her next meeting.

If she was lucky, Flopsy thought, the other meeting would have fewer exciting developments.