Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten

The grizzled grey rabbit with the white tufts of fur was making the rounds and, Earry thought sourly, probably enjoying himself far too much. The sergeant had arrived at the small administrative office in the ferry terminal where Flopsy's team had been meeting shortly after the humans cleared out for Sunday evening. Earry had stopped listening to him before he had started speaking, which was both harder and easier than it sounded. On the one hand, Earry's ears were extra sensitive, so trying not to hear any specific thing was difficult. On the other hand, that sensitivity meant that Earry's ears picked up a whole host of sounds besides talking, meaning there actually were things for him to stop listening to before the bunny began speaking.

Blah blah blah, Earry thought, listening instead to the silence of Flopsy's team. They were much better at keeping quiet than any other team to which he had been assigned, which was quite impressive. They had a solid reputation which they had borne up in the past week, but the measure of silence was Earry's own unofficial way of evaluating the professionalism of a team.

Under normal circumstances, Harey had a tendency to shift his weight, making the faint noises that entailed, and Hopert's ears didn't really stay very still, with a completely different set of associated sounds. Flopsy didn't seem to have anything consistent - another sign of professionalism, Earry thought, as if she had mastered even the comfort motions of her body. Here and now, however, all of their little movements had stilled. Earry had caught only one slight movement from each of them, at the same time, which had been when the ol' sarge had mentioned their inability to find Alfalfa - surprisingly, Flopsy had shifted the most. However, even her movement had been stilled almost before it started, and Earry doubted even the experienced sergeant had been able to identify the movement, and he mentally gave Flopsy and her team another point.

Earry noted a slight shift in background noise - perhaps the sergeant had finished the wrangling phase and entered instruction phase - and tuned back in.

"Now I'm told you lot have actually been doing rather well, surprisingly," the rabbit said with a practiced almost sneer, while Earry wondered if he meant that it was surprising he'd been told this, or that they had been doing well. He doubted the tufted rabbit believed they had done well at all. Sergeants never seemed to think anything positive of their troops, in his experience. "Pah!" the rabbit spat. "However well you may have performed or thought you performed last week, this week the mission parameters are completely different. This week is a whole 'nother carrot! I expect you all to remember that, and if I hear any of youse has been slacking, you know just what I'll do to the performance reviews the higher ups have been hearing!

"Frankly, I've seen nothing yet to earn you the accolades I've heard. I doubt you're up to scratch, you lot, but," the rabbit bit off a smile with his suddenly larger-seeming teeth - how did he achieve that effect? Earry wondered admiringly - "I'm willing to let you prove yourselves this week.

"Now, this here is Week Two. You may not know what that means. I'll tell you: it's time to kick these so-called novelists in the pants and throw them completely off their plots. This is the week in which they are most vulnerable to self-doubt, and we are going to throw plot shift after plot shift at them until they can't find the direction in which their story is going even if they spend hours poring over their precious plot outlines.

"Last week was about restraint and keeping from showing our cards completely; this week is about gumption. We are gonna get out there and break down their careful stories, their crafted characters. We're going to wipe out every last trace of coherent plot that they thought they had. And if I don't think you're kicking the plot out of enough amateur novelists..." the sergeant let that sentence trail off and eyeballed each member of the small group.

Earry mentally shook his head. He wondered if sarge knew that it was this team who had monitored the Office of Letters and Light and brought back the intelligence behind the orders he was giving. Somehow he doubted it.

It was interesting though - the elder archetypes normally had a policy of giving credit where credit was due. And this little fact had no reason to be kept secret - the team was no longer working the OLL, and there were no secrets in the debrief Flopsy had given the elder archetypes. He had listened in, and the most interesting of the facts she had mentioned were the Week Two slump and a few tidbits about the individuals in charge at the OLL. But there was nothing except Week Two that he expected the bunnies would be able to exploit.

However, Earry supposed they might be trying to appear more knowledgeable in and of themselves than in the past... that had the potential to concentrate more power in and support for their own body, rather than for the agents to whom they gave the credit. At least, support from the average plot bunny. Earry rather thought that many of the smarter bunnies aspired to be given some of that credit, for a taste of the fame and respect it garnered, if nothing else. Not Flopsy, he supposed.

Of course, if the elder archetypes were just making a few exceptions with critical tidbits like this one, they could make the best of both worlds. They would be thought to be able to gain the most sensitive knowledge on their own, while being able to give lesser credit to others and continue to have rabbits aspire to be on their recognition list. And that was something Earry would not put past the new grey leader... He was nothing if not political.

Again a change in the background noise as a sudden wider silence descended. Earry realised that the sergeant had finished his spiel while he himself had been tuned out, because Flopsy was now crouching respectfully and asking a question.

"Are the elder archetypes willing to let us know how the mission is going at the Office of Letters and Light, sir?"

"That is not for you to know, plot bunny!" the sergeant barked, his tufts of fur somehow seeming to stand even straighter in all the wrong directions. Another tirck Earry wished he knew the method for, although even if he did, he doubted he would use it. Likely the sergeant was doing it involuntarily anyway - a more interesting signal of body language than most that Earry saw. He carefully avoided displaying any sign of amusement.

"Of course, sir," Flopsy crouched further. "Thank you sir. We will do our best to display gumption this week, sir."

Oh, the sergeant would eat that up, Earry thought. She had definitely taken his measure, as she had shown with her initial crouch of respect, and here... masterful. Earry upped his assessment of her a notch, and wondered what made her so much less adept with the elder archetypes. Or perhaps he simply hadn't known her style well enough to appreciate her approach... while he aimed for as neutral as possible, she went for deference... and perhaps it worked better. Something to think about, although Earry didn't see himself changing his own techniques at all.

Still.

The sergeant did indeed eat it up, somehow puffing his chest up even more. Earry doubted the rabbit knew how off-balance it made him appear, and again forced himself to hide his amusement.

"Right! Go to it, plot bunnies!" the sergeant barked, and somehow made his hops out the small office's door seem like a march. As soon as his tail disappeared through the wood of the door, Earry's ears twitched in suddenly released humour.

"That went well," Earry said to the room in general, then turned to Flopsy. "You know, if you wanted an update on the Office of Letters and Light, you could have asked."

"Oh?" asked Flopsy archly. "And what do you know about the OLL?"

"I do have quite sensitive ears," he said without any particular pride. "I sometimes hear more than the elder archetypes believe, especially if I wait outside the tower while my friend BUn-Bun reports about his team's progress in San Francisco, where, as you know, the OLL is based."

"And you would share that information with us?" Flopsy tilted her head in a way Earry hadn't seen from her before, and he wondered if she meant it to be doubtful or challenging, or something else.

"You're my team, no matter how we ended up this way," Earry said without inflection. He may as well acknowledge that his place in the team had not been at the choice of either himself or of Flopsy. "So if you, the team lead, believe that the information would be useful for the team, then yes, I will share it." He paused. "Besides, it's not like you don't know the OLL better than any of us besides the team who is there now."

"I do think it's important," Flopsy said. "I doubt the rest of the mission will succeed unless that part does. I've seen what happens when the pep talks come out of the OLL. Suddenly people see how all the disparate ideas hang together, and then it won't matter how far off their plotlines the ideas are - more people will just run with whatever ideas we throw at them. That's one of the strengths of Chris Baty, and that is the greatest threat that I think we face.

"Well, in that case, I'm happy to give you an update," Earry said.

"Please," Flopsy told him, settling herself comfortably on the administrative office's desk in such a way that she was facing Earry, making it clear that he had her full attention. Harey and Hopert followed suit.

Earry offered a half-crouch in acknowledgement, collecting his thoughts as he did so.

"The San Francisco team is fairly large, as it is the initiating point of this whole novelling endeavour," Earry began. "They've put two members on dedicated duty at the OLL, and supplement as needed with others from various sub-teams in the city. The two dedicated bunnies have widely different narratives - I won't tell you what they are, sorry, but I've worked with them both before - and with the variety of others in the city, they can plant a very large variety of ideas and plotlines. They also have enough members that they are able to provide much more nuance than we can in a small group like ours.

"The two also have a very special skill, which I haven't seen in anyone else, and which I don't understand the working of myself. They are able to pick up plot ideas from others - or perhaps from the humans with which they work, I'm not sure which - and weave them into their own narratives, which at this point means that each of them alone have a vast repertoire from which to pull, and they are adept at providing ideas which the author thinks will lead in a certain direction but which actually come together to form a completely different narrative - if the authors complete it. They are both experienced enough to jump in at different points in their own narratives as well, which, when paired with the complexity of their narratives, means that they are the most versatile plot bunnies I have ever met."

Earry paused for a moment to let that sink in.

"Now, as I said, I have no idea how it works. I'm not supposed to know that that's what they're doing at all, but as I said I am friends with both of them, and I also have sensitive ears. Don't pass it on." Earry wondered if they realised how dangerous it was for them to have that information, and he absently wondered if the reason he was willing to tell them was that he thought he would be asked to clean them up before the end of this mission anyway. He hoped not. He liked this crew. "The reason I pass it on is to make it clear that the elder archetypes do know that the OLL is the lynchpin of this operation, and they have assigned to the OLL the best agents we have produced in Bunniption Base."

Earry decided not to explain what else he knew about Bun-Bun's talents. He'd already said enough that would get both the team and himself in trouble, and if he told them about Bun-Bun's ... abilities... or about how he came to know about those particular talents, they might wonder about his own, which would only make his own job more difficult if he had to use them. Besides, Bun-Bun looked nearly harmless - just a small lop-eared black-and-white spotted bunny, innocent as could be as long as he didn't say more than a word or two - and it was just as well that they take him at face value if they saw him. Bun-Bun sometimes took offence at the smallest things, and someone would get hurt. Not Bun-Bun, of course.

In any event. Earry pulled his thoughts together.

"Bun-Bun agrees with your debrief about Chris Baty: no matter what we do, he'll roll with it into his novel. So the focus has switched to where he does the most damage to our cause as a whole: the messages he sends to the National Novel Writing Month community.

"You probably read some of Chris Baty's work during your time at the OLL, so you know how all over the place his messages - like his prose - are, but you also know how he pulls it all together into a coherent, encouraging message. This coherence is what Bun-Bun and his crew are targeting.

"Again, I'm not sure exactly what they have done to manage this, but somehow they've found a way to convince Chris that he has managed to unify his message, when it's actually a discordant mess. He's supposed to send it out as a pep talk tonight, and may have already, actually. When Bun-Bun gave his report last night, he sounded very confident that the talk had been thoroughly disrupted. I should know more after my next encounter with him, but our reporting times aren't likely to overlap again until at least Tuesday."

Earry considered what he had said so far; he thought he had hit most of the points of interest. At least, the ones he was willing to divulge.

"Any questions?" he asked.

"I'd love to know more about that technique," Harey said before Flopsy could answer. "I know you said you don't know, but if those sensitive ears of yours happen to catch anything... perhaps you would share with your good ol' teammates?"

"I will certainly consider it," Earry answered, stilling his ears before his amusement showed. Then again, perhaps he would share... This was a good team; if their eminences the elder archetypes in their infinite wisdom decided to leave him with them...

But in that unlikely event, he doubted the team would survive with its current level of trust and camaraderie - the factors which made it so effective! - if the others knew that he was one of the bunnies used to clean up potential "problems". They probably didn't even know the cleaner agents existed. And if they had him on their team, they would likely be unhappy with the sorts of missions they ended up working.

"Thank you for the update, Earry," Flopsy said. "I feel a lot better knowing that a pair you hold in such esteem are taking care of disrupting the OLL. I would appreciate it if you would let me know anything else that you hear on that issue." Flopsy held Earry's gaze, and he flipped his ears in acknowledgement.

"Tuesday may be an issue," Flopsy said. "I want you to be at that write-in with me. We haven't found Alf yet, and the leads we got at the ferry were just too buried by the sheer volume of people who go through the terminal. The fact that that sergeant saw fit to hassle us over his continued absence means it's becoming more urgent for our survival as a team, as well as our prestige back at Base, and we don't want to lose that. So more than 'gumption', we need to make progress in finding Alf." Flopsy's ears twitched with a touch of amusement. "The Tuesday night write-in is the best chance we have, and we don't want to miss it. Your skills will be valuable, so even at the risk of missing out on an update on the OLL, I want you there, Earry."

Earry crouched acquiescence.

"I would also like to know something else, Earry. I don't know if you will have heard already. If I'm right, it won't have been spoken about at all back at Base, but the basic premise should be easily verifiable the next time you're in Bunniption Base." Flopsy paused, and Earry found his curiousity genuinely piqued. Something which was not discussed, and which she was unwilling to ask the sergeant. Interesting that she was willing to ask him...

"As with Earry's comments about the abilities of our colleagues at the OLL, keep this to yourselves, team," she told them, looking each member of her team in the eye.

"One of the main reasons for this mission is to avoid the decimation in our ranks that comes from an overabundance of plotlet kits reaching plot bunny status, because of the massive influx of excess creative energy from the brain carrots we absorb," Flopsy said, rather restating the obvious - even the sergeant knew this, Earry thought. But there must be a reason for her to bring it up.

"But where are they?" she continued. "Surely they would have bolstered our ranks in the field by now, inexperienced as they would be - they would have to, because even with the increased intake of brain carrots, we couldn't support that many new plot bunnies unless they were helping with the harvest. That rapid growth is what makes the novelling month dangerous... but if we've done something else to limit the impact on our growth, what are we doing this whole mission for? A bumper crop of carrots in the fall is not a bad thing, except that it isn't sustainable and it has such an immediate impact on us.

"And we all know that there are other ways to prevent the growth of our plotlet kits. The easiest is just to let us keep more of the creative energy for ourselves, and while we joke that then 'the plot bunnies would thicken', my own belief is that we would become more powerful, not more fat.

"I believe our elder archetypes are avoiding that option in order to prevent exactly that: power in the hands of regular plot bunnies. They can't want any of us to become a threat to their own hold on power.

"So where is the power going?" Flopsy asked, looking around again at each of the bunnies in her team. "There is always a huge growth during the first week of November. If the power isn't going to plotlet kits and isn't going to us, it's either going to the elder archetypes, or it's going somewhere else.

"But wherever it's ending up, we are feeding that person or persons. So it is our responsibility to know what we are growing." Flopsy looked straight at Earry. "So if you would, please, Earry, I would appreciate confirmation that we haven't gained as many new plot sibs as we have in the past after the first week of this novelling month. And if we aren't, please keep your ears open for any inklings of where all the creative energy is going... preferably without the elder archetypes knowing you're trying to find out."

Even at the end, her gaze met Earry's squarely, with no wavering, no uncertainty. Interesting, he thought. She was appealing to - what, his sense of responsibility? of belonging to the ranks of rabbits who were sending creative energy into some giant pool without knowing who was drinking from its wealth... And even though she knew he was likely reporting on her actions and his opinions of them to the very people she thought was likely benefiting illicitly from the ignorance of the plot bunny ranks, she was asking his help.

And it was working. He wanted to help. With utmost respect, Earry crouched his acceptance of the task from his team lead.



"Good," Flopsy said, turning brusquely to other orders of business. "Now team, we do have our work cut out for us in terms of disruption. The eloquent sergeant spoke of gumption, but I think our discipline will serve us better. Rather than switching willy-nilly, I think we should rotate, throw an entirely new but consistent plotline at the novelists, hopefully something alien to what they have been writing and which may not work for the plot, characters, and setting that they have already written. Throwing in a few other ideas, like this past week, will be important, but the focus needs to be on a completely different new plot line."

"And we have to sell that to the bunnies in our zone after sarge has given them the gumption talk?" Hopert asked, ears dipping in dry amusement. "Great..."

"Well, as the sergeant said: plot bunnies, go to it!" Flopsy smiled at them all, ears waving in utmost amusement and whiskers expressing warmest affection for her team, and they all headed out of the administrative office to start their rounds of the region's rabbits.