Submitted by Char on Wed, 05/12/2010 - 5:32pm

Irk is taking a break this week. Rather than spoil y'all with the stuff we're planning to run for the hiatus, our dearest most awesomest friend Trav wrote a short for us. ♥ Much like everyone else in the universe, she seems to have found Gerude and Erynn to be an AWESOME pair to pick on...

~*~

The bed was narrow but it was clean and it was comfortable and it was a bed.  It was midmorning when what sounded like an army of screaming children woke me up.  I looked out the window to find... an army of screaming children.  Children ran rampant through the streets shrieking and flinging things at each other.  Of course they were.

"I'm sorry," Linnet apologized when I came into the kitchen, though she didn't look particularly sorry.  "The festival starts tomorrow, so the children have all been released to help decorate."

"It's fine."  It was just after ten in the morning.  "Did Erynn come in?"  She shook her head.

"But my grandmother got home half an hour ago," she clarified.

I sighed and went to go look for Erynn.  I found him in what was probably going to be the area cleared for dancing--a large, open, grassy area with a trestle table to one side and a bandstand--being mugged by a couple of old people.

No, really.

The tiniest, wrinkliest old woman I had ever seen was snuggled (there was no better word for it) around Erynn's elbow and keeping up a constant narrative that seemed to boil down to "Where are we going?  What are we doing? I like you."  She was the one holding him down.  The one doing the mugging was an old man so bald and bandy-legged he looked like a frog wearing pants.  The contents of Erynn's rucksack were scattered around them and he was trying to stop the old man, hide his rucksack, pick up his things, not step on them, not trip over the old woman, and not hurt either of them in the process.

He was not succeeding.

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