Everybody, pony or otherwise, was gathered around a coffee table in the living room. Some of them were attempting to push each other away to get more room on the (apparently superbly comfy) couch, but it was restrained. Thorax even felt comfortable enough to stay as a changeling, although he stayed away from most of the crowd and kept shuffling from hoof to hoof. Starlight half-wanted to speak up, but Bon Bon seemed to be taking control of the situation. Considering how resolute she was acting, Starlight was inclined to let her.
“So,” said Bon Bon, “our target is the Canyon Rim Casino, the tallest building in town. You’ve all seen it, right?” Murmurs of assent. “Somewhere in there is the Alicorn Amulet.”
“And my money,” piped up Gilda.
“And her money,” acknowledged Bon Bon. “We’ll get that, too. But we don’t know where in there it is. We don’t know what the layout of the building is. We don’t know what kind of security they have. In short, we know nothing about it. So.” She collapsed onto her rump and looked around at everypony. “Any ideas?”
Derpy’s hoof rose before silence fell. “See if the town hall has blueprints,” she said. “Even if they’re faked, since Goumada is a shady pony and all, they’ll give us some idea of what the inside of the building’s like in the employee areas. Maybe.”
“That’s…” Bon Bon paused. “That’s not bad. And- Is somepony writing this down?”
“Got it,” said Sunburst, who was jotting notes on a sheet of paper. Starlight wondered if he’d come to the meeting prepared or if he’d just happened to be moseying around everywhere with quill and paper ready Just in Case. Probably the latter.
Bon Bon nodded. “Alright. And we can scout out the main casino floor until then, find out where the entrances and exits are. Any other ideas?”
“Well…” Rainbow Dash twisted some of her hair around her hoof, then reluctantly said, “As long as I don’t have to do it… watch the guards for their shift patterns. Like, when would they be ready to go home and be the least attentive? That sorta thing.” She glared at the crowd. “But seriously, don’t make me do it, that stuff’s boring.”
“We’ll keep that in mind,” said Bon Bon flatly.
“I would imagine,” the Doctor suddenly spoke up, “that an establishment that large and varied would require, ah, a great deal of food to keep everypony properly refreshed. And if food and drinks are shipped there every days, we could maybe get in as food deliveryponies.”
“Wouldn’t they recognize the usual… deliverers?” asked Lyra.
“We don’t know yet, do we? Perhaps different ponies unload the food each time.”
“Recording that, by the way,” said Sunburst.
A few more ideas were bounced around, but none of them was quite as direct as the ones already presented. Starlight thought that they almost looked like they knew what they were doing. It was something resembling promising. Still, it wasn’t long before the ideas petered out and everyone was more making halfhearted suggestions to fill the silence.
Bon Bon held up a hoof. “Okay, I think we’re done brainstorming for the day. We sho-”
“Hang on,” Gilda spoke up. “One more thing.” She turned to Starlight. “Didn’t you say that Gouda Feta-” (Bon Bon’s cough sounded suspiciously like, Goumada!) “-mind-controlled you? Can you do anything about that? ’Cause I don’t want somepony digging inside my brain and screwing with my thoughts.”
“Um, maybe,” Starlight said. The reminder of her screwup made her flush red; she flicked her ears as she resisted the urge to look away. “I’d need to, um, review the, uh, spell she used on me.”
“I can help with that,” said Sunburst. One of Starlight’s nerves unwound.
“Any other ideas?” asked Bon Bon. No response. “Then let’s split up into groups and get on this. Derpy, you’ve worked in a bureaucracy-”
Derpy’s wings burst open as she got to her feet. “Excuse me?” she said indignantly. “I’ll have you know that the post is efficient. We have the highest prosecution rate of any Equestrian law enforcement branch, you know!”
“…You, um, have experience with… government offices,” continued a shocked Bon Bon, “I’ll go with you to town hall. Gilda, you were already kind of scouting out the building, right? You can keep doing that with Rainbow and Lyra. No, Rainbow, you don’t need to watch the guards just yet. Sunburst and Starlight can start working on that anti-mind-control spell. Thorax, Doctor, you two… You know what, just go shopping. We need some food in these cabinets. Any kind of food.” Bon Bon squinted at Thorax. “Speaking of which-”
“IpromiseIwon’tfeedonanyofyou!” squawked Thorax, pushing away. “And the Crystal Empire’s got so much excess love that I don’t think I’ll even need to because even though I’ve only been taking bits and pieces where it won’t go missing I feel really full so I-”
“Relax, Thorax,” said Sunburst. He gave a mild stinkeye to Bon Bon. “Thorax is completely trustworthy. And, and if you ever imply otherwise, I’ll… I’ll… be very annoyed.” He grimaced and suddenly grew incredibly engrossed in examining his notes.
Bon Bon opened her mouth, paused, and said, “Fine. Any objections?” There weren’t any. “Then let’s get going.”
The group broke apart in something resembling a professional manner, and in less than a minute, Starlight and Sunburst were alone in the living room, Sunburst’s scratching quill making the only sound. Neither of them said anything for a while. Sunburst coughed and said, “Rainbow Dash, she told me what happened, and, um… Well.”
“Yeah,” Starlight mumbled. “Well.” She kicked sullenly at the coffee table and stubbed her hoof for her trouble. “I really can’t go for very long without messing something up, can I? Twilight tells me to make friends, I run into somepony who just wants to use me to get to Twilight. I try to do some homework, I wind up mind-controlling ponies who’re supposed to be my friends. And now…”
“You linger on the past too much, Starlight,” Sunburst said. He pushed his glasses up his muzzle. “You really need to learn to, to let things go. Getting mind-controlled wasn’t even your fault!”
“Easy for you to say,” Starlight snorted. “You’ve never done any of those things.”
“It’s, I’m just saying-”
“Have you let go of flunking out of magic school yet?”
“I’m working on it,” Sunburst said defensively. “I-” He cut himself off, took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “I didn’t say it was easy,” he said. “But could you cool all the ‘woe is me’ moaning?”
Breathe deep, breathe deep, breathe deep… You wanted to smack somepony the most when that was the only response left that didn’t involve admitting they were right. And Starlight wanted to smack Sunburst very much right now. But with her friendship GPA dangerously close to tanking, Starlight didn’t want to do any little thing that would risk tipping it over entirely. “I’ll try,” she mumbled. She abruptly stood up straight. “Anyway, mind control,” she said quickly. “Do you really think you can stop it?”
“Maybe, yeah,” Sunburst said nonchalantly. “It’d depend on the type used. What did it feel like when, when you were… you know. Can you remember it?”
“It…” Starlight sighed. “Everything just felt great, no matter what the thing was. Like, if you’d asked me to count every blade of grass in Equestria, I would’ve been thrilled to do something so comprehensive.” The feeling had been so freakishly good that simply thinking about it almost made her long for it again. Almost. “And I just didn’t care about anything, either. I would’ve enjoyed eating lemon cake, and you know how I feel about lemon cake.”
“Incorrectly,” said Sunburst. He pushed his glasses up his muzzle. “So. Complete loosening of, loosening of inhibitions coupled with, with an extreme feeling of pleasure. That, does that sound right?” Starlight nodded, and he continued, “Then it might, it might not be mind control at all, not precisely. See, it’s, it’s kind of like you were high and drunk at the same time. The happiness made you eager to please, and the lack of caring made you open to any form of, you’d do whatever somepony asked you to. It’s not really mind control, more…” He frowned and flicked his tail as he drummed a hoof on the ground. “Extreme susceptibility to suggestion, like plying somepony with beer to make them drunk and, and do what you want. Kinda clever, actually.”
Starlight stared at Sunburst.
“Well, once you get over the whole emotional manipulation thing, obviously!” protested Sunburst. “It, it doesn’t really do anything legal spells don’t! The, the happiness could just come from an extreme version of Felicity’s Pick-Me-Up Spell, and the suggestibility thing is, it’s sometimes used in therapy, always voluntarily, to get patients more willing to talk about-”
Sunburst really hadn’t changed, not one bit. “So,” Starlight cut in, “do you think you can block it?”
“Probably. I’ll, I need a while to review the spells I know that can, that can do that, but come back tomorrow, and, yeah, definitely.” Sunburst half-smiled. “Don’t… ask me to, to cast them, though.”
“Yeah. Do you want some help with review?”
“Not rea- Sure. Yeah, of course. You can add any, any spells I miss and do the casting to see, to see if the countermeasures actually work. So, um…” Sunburst flipped his paper over. “There was Felicity’s…”
Thorax-Changeling had never tasted a stranger confluence of emotions than the haze in the so-called supermarket. Anxiety, joy, despair, happiness, frustration, contentment, hatred, satisfaction, sadness… And that was just in this aisle. He felt like he’d been stuffed in a washing machine with emotions instead of clothes. Ponies passed him and the Doctor-Earth-Brown by, never giving them more than a passing glance, yet never hitting them. It was a weird combination of paying no attention while simultaneously paying all the attention.
The actual content of the store wasn’t helping things. What was food, even? Nothing in the store seemed to have anything in common with anything else. And neither Cadance-Alicorn-Pink nor Shining-Unicorn-White nor Sunburst-Unicorn-Orange had ever been able to satisfactorily explain “food” to him during his time in the Crystal Empire. All he knew was that food went into ponies’ heads and… stuff… came out down… there. It wasn’t easy, like emotions, where you just let your own magic absorb it, work it, and you felt better.
He was glad he had something to do, but he had a nagging suspicion Bon Bon-Earth-Tan had just given this particular job to him to get him out of the way, because he was completely lost traipsing up and down the shelves of this particular store as the Doctor-Earth-Brown picked out what they needed to buy for their team to ingest.
“Do you honestly put these in your mouth?” Thorax-Crystal-Blue asked, examining a head of lettuce. “And just… inhale them?”
“We do not inhale them,” tutted the Doctor-Earth-Brown, “we swallow them. And that’s actually a good-looking collection of lettuce.” He plucked it from the shelf and stuck it in the cart.
“They both go down your throat. What’s the difference?” Thorax-Crystal-Blue asked. He stared at the different kinds of lettuce. That was Romaine, that was Iceberg, that was Summercrisp, that was Butterhead, and they all looked nearly identical: green balls of wrinkly leaves. Screw food. Seriously.
“What do you mean, ‘what’s the difference’?” scoffed the Doctor-Earth-Brown. “Haven’t you ever swallowed anything in your life?”
Thorax-Crystal-Blue looked around. No other ponies were too near to them. “No,” he whispered.
“…Rrrrrright,” said the Doctor-Earth-Brown, flicking his tail. Thorax-Crystal-Blue tasted embarrassment bubbling over inside him. “You, ah, don’t… eat like… right. But, hang on, haven’t you eaten anything during infiltrations, perhaps?”
“I’m not a very good infiltrator,” Thorax-Crystal-Blue mumbled, squirming. He knew he wasn’t supposed to care about that anymore, but he couldn’t help it. “I’m not a good changeling at all. If I was, do you think I’d be living in the Crystal Empire?”
“By Celestia, I’m simply inserting my hoof into my mouth nonstop today, aren’t I?” Whatever that meant. He hid it well, but the Doctor-Earth-Brown was practically dosed in sheepishness.
“It’s alright,” said Thorax-Crystal-Blue. “It’s not like you mean to sound stupid, right? Heh heh heh…” His laugh couldn’t have sounded more forced if it’d been squeezed out of him with a vise.
“Hem. Yes.” The Doctor-Earth-Brown plucked some cabbage from the shelves. (Cabbage was apparently even more different from lettuce than different kinds of lettuce were from each other, even though they were all green balls of wrinkly leaves.) Thorax-Crystal-Blue flinched as lances of surprise shot from the Doctor-Earth-Brown; surprise was too hot for his tastes. The Doctor-Earth-Brown said, “Well, ah… Have you ever gulped?”
“That thing I sometimes do when I’m nervous in pony form? This?” And Thorax-Crystal-Blue forced himself to gulp. The sensation was still as weird as it had ever been, particularly the way it was briefly impossible to breathe.
“That’s swallowing.”
“It is? And you stick food in your mouth when you do it?”
“Exactly!” Happiness flowed from the Doctor-Earth-Brown like a river as he smiled. Thorax-Crystal-Blue wasn’t sure why; the whole idea was beyond bizarre.
“So let me get this straight. You take something like… this…” He waved a box of Hoof Hooves in the Doctor-Earth-Brown’s face. (The Doctor-Earth-Brown quickly snatched them and dropped them in the cart.) “You stuff it into your mouth… Then you swallow… And somehow the food gets into your body and somehow you get energy from that.”
“Well, it does need to go to the back of the mouth to actually get into your throat.”
“Oh, so you need to stuff it so far into your mouth that you can’t even breathe.”
“Ehm… Yes?”
Thorax-Crystal-Blue looked at the Doctor-Earth-Brown. The Doctor-Earth-Brown looked at Thorax-Crystal-Blue. “I think I’ll stick with emotions, thanks,” Thorax-Crystal-Blue said flatly. “There’s less chance of suffocation.”
“Well, your loss if you don’t want to taste jelly foals.”
Bon Bon stared at the building above her, looming ominously like an object of prophecy. Cold dread crept up and down her spine and her heart seemed reluctant to beat. She wiped her forehead down as horrific memories sprang to the forefront of her mind. This had always been one of the worst parts of her life. She was going to have to interact with… shudder… bureaucrats.
It was an unfortunate fact of life, but bureaucracies were everywhere. Even when Bon Bon had been Sweetie Drops, she’d needed to contend with bureaucracies (whether they’d nominally been on her side or not, they’d always been working against her). One of the nice things about a small town like Ponyville was that the few bureaucracies that existed were proportionately smaller, so she needed to spend less time in them.
But here it was. Her old arch-nemesis, leading a collection of her old regular-nemeses.
“You look tense,” Derpy said as they walked into the town hall.
“Bureaucrats,” muttered Bon Bon.
“Don’t worry. It’ll be over soon. Oh, look at those statues! They’re pretty!”
Bon Bon had already noticed the statues, as she had already done the usual unknown-area look-over for entrances and exits out of habit. They were pretty, admittedly, but not what she was concerned with. The entrance lobby didn’t seem too crowded, but Bon Bon hadn’t the slightest clue of where to go. She started pulling Derpy towards the receptionist. “Come on. We’ve got to find where the regional clerk i-”
“Second floor, room 238.”
Coming to a halt with a hoof-on-linoleum squeak, Bon Bon stared at Derpy. “How do you-”
“It’s on the sign. See?” Derpy pointed at a nearby sign, not too far from the statues. Bon Bon skimmed the entries, and sure enough, Derpy was right.
A little more than a minute of navigation later, and the pair was standing right outside the door to room 238. “So, um,” whispered Derpy, “do you know anything about getting bureaucrats to give you blueprints? I don’t. I don’t even know why you brought me here, to be honest…”
Truth be told, former secret agent that she was, Bon Bon had been formulating a plan on the way up. But she wasn’t sure how suspicious a “yes” answer would be, so she just said, “Maybe. I’ve got an idea. Follow me, but let me do the talking, okay?”
The regional clerk’s office was close to empty. Bon Bon and Derpy were quickly shuttled to a secretary, a somewhat thin unicorn who had evidently decided that, since it takes more muscles to frown than to smile, she might as well frown a lot and get some semblance of a workout in while sitting at her desk. She cleared her throat. “How can I help you?”
“Hey,” said Bon Bon, keeping her eyes slightly downcast and her voice at a higher, more vulnerable pitch than usual. “My friend and I — she’s Blueberry Muffins-” Derpy smiled and waved. “-we’re interns at the Canyon Rim Casino, and-”
“Casinos have interns?” asked the secretary, a touch suspiciously.
“Financial analysts,” said Bon Bon, and quickly moved on before the issue could be pressed. “Anyway, they — our bosses, I mean — they wanted us to get the blueprints for the casino for some reason, construction or something, but they-” She groaned, injecting a little despair into the anxiety. “They didn’t even tell us where to look, so I, I was wondering if you could help me.” She tugged on her mane, then leaned forward and whispered, “I think they’re hazing us.”
The secretary’s expression immediately softened. “Sounds like it, and from what I’ve heard of Goumada, it wouldn’t surprise me. We don’t have commercial plans here-” (Bon Bon hitched her breathing.) “-but I can find out the company that built it, and you can stop by their offices once you have a moment. They’ll be able to help you. Give me a minute.” She left her seat and went around to the back.
Bon Bon surreptitiously grinned at Derpy. Derpy unsurreptitiously grinned back.
When the secretary returned, she dropped a single sheet of paper on the desk, a name and address scribbled down. “The casino was built by Steadfast and Holding’s,” the clerk said. “Right here in town. You’ll need to pay a small fee to get the blueprints, but you can put it down as a business expense. …And you know what? Pick up some coffee and muffins and see if you can hide those in the bill, too. Honestly, sending financial interns to get blueprints?” She shook her head, tutting. “And Goumada wonders why her turnover rate is so high.”
O-ho. That was news. And the clerk’s tone of voice… Well. Maybe Trotter Gorge wouldn’t care that much if Goumada got robbed. Bon Bon’s smile wasn’t faked at all. “Thank you so much!” she said, taking the paper. “I can’t wait to see the looks on their faces!”
“And we will definitely get those muffins!” added Derpy. “What place would you recommend?”
“Quick Bread’s,” said the clerk. “Here.” She snatched the paper back and scribbled another address down. “And get the banana bread ones, they’re the best. Thank you for stopping by, and have a nice day.”
Bon Bon and Derpy managed to keep it together until they were outside the town hall, when they strode down the stairs with springs in their steps. Derpy giggled. “That was easy,” she said. “Where’d you learn to do that?”
“It’s easy. Politeness mixed with sob stories and puppy-dog eyes,” said Bon Bon, chuckling. “Gets them every time.”
Derpy’s spring became a touch unwound as she stared at Bon Bon.
“Actually, it might work better with you, since you’ll win extra sympathy points.”
“…Good point. So about those muffins…” And Derpy put what she’d learned to the test.
It was effective, honestly. “Sure. Why not?”
Against all odds, she did not like casinos, Rainbow Dash decided. They were loud, gaudy, noisy, crowded, raucous, confusing, and riotous, and not in any cool ways. Awesomeness required a razor-sharp focus. The inside of the Canyon Rim Casino was trying to pull her attention in all directions at once, and gah was it disorienting. It was probably supposed to make you feel like a winner, but Rainbow preferred to feel like a winner via ponies chanting her name (or, y’know, actually winning, which was hard to come by in casinos). She felt pressed in to Gilda and Lyra simply because they weren’t making all the noises all the time.
And then there were the windows, or lack thereof. With no way to see the outside, Rainbow felt like she was being imprisoned. Even Twilight’s throne room had skylights. How could anypony enjoy it in here? This place was oppressive, like everypony was getting herded into a pit by vampires to be drained dry of their blood and loving every second of it. Rainbow Dash would rather have the strictest Wonderbolt training regimen any da-
“Rainbow!”
Rainbow Dash jumped at Gilda squawking in her ear. “What?” she asked as she hit her head a few times. “And don’t yell at me like that!”
“Stop trying to look thoughtful, it doesn’t suit you.”
Punch.
She rubbed her beak, but Gilda was smirking. “Well, it doe-”
A guard was between the two of them so quickly she might as well have teleported if she hadn’t been a pegasus. She planted a hoof on Rainbow Dash’s chest. “Please do not harm the other patrons,” she said in the casually threatening voice of bouncers everywhere, “or you will be ejected from the premises.”
“Hey!” said Rainbow, pushing the hoof away. “I didn’t harm her! She was okay with that! Go ahead and ask her!”
The guard raised an eyebrow, then turned to Gilda.
Gilda puffed up her chest feathers, flared her wings, and bellowed, “It’s how griffons show affection, you ninny! Don’t you know the culture of anybody that doesn’t have hooves? You ponies are all racist!”
“Oh, Celestia, it’s you.” And suddenly the guard was gone.
“That was a pretty fast response,” said Lyra. “These guys must be alert.”
Which was, unfortunately, a pretty accurate point. Ponies of every tribe and color, and even more than a few griffons, were stuffed between the poker tables and slot machines, and yet this guard had picked them out in seconds like Pinkie Pie sniffing out which cupcake had come out the oven last. Fast guards? Rainbow added to her mental checklist she’d just created. Need to confirm. (Over the next minute, she’d accidentally shred that mental checklist, because Rainbow Dash wasn’t very good at keeping track of checklists, mental or otherwise.)
The guard also made Rainbow Dash remember just what they were here for. She looked up; no tribe other than pegasi habitually looked up, making it a perfect spot to hide… something. Right? Apparently so; there were strange black half-globes dotting the ceiling. They were shiny, like they were made of glass, but it was impossible to see anything inside them. “Hey. Lyra.” Rainbow nudged Lyra and glanced up. “You see those?”
Lyra frowned as she examined the ceiling. “Huh. Wonder what they are.”
“Does it matter?” snorted Gilda.
“It might!” said Rainbow. “We’re here for your money as much as our Amulet, so pay attention!”
“There are guards in all four corners of the room,” Gilda said promptly, “no more than two, and they don’t move. Five or six circle around the room at different distances from the center, all going counter-clockwise. There’s another two at the entrance and three over there, at the place where change money for tokens and vice-versa. And finally, another eight or so roam the room at random, to keep things interesting.” She glowered. “Yes, I’m paying attention.”
“That many? Wow,” said Lyra. She craned her neck, trying and failing to look over the heads of everypony else in the room. “How’d you notice them?”
“They’re wearing suits, mostly,” said Gilda. “And they’re wearing something in their-” She pointed at the side of her head, paused, then pointed at one of Lyra’s ears. “-in their ear. Once you see it-”
“Oh, oh, yeah,” said Lyra. “I see them. There’s… Yeah, there’s a lot of them. Whoof.”
“Don’t know where they’re coming from, though. I still haven’t seen any employee entrances yet, though.”
“I think I saw a door over there,” said Rainbow Dash, pointing. “Think I should check it out?”
“Sure,” snorted Gilda.
“Uh-huh,” said Lyra. Of Gilda, she asked, “Random segue: how do you keep track of all those claws?”
“…What?”
“I’llbegoingthen.” Rainbow Dash quickly began working her way through the crowd.
“I don’t have claws,” said Lyra, “so I was wondering how you-”
Their conversation was swallowed up by the rest of the din. It wasn’t long before Rainbow popped out of the mob near the wall, right next to a door marked “Employees Only”. It didn’t have a handle. Rainbow gave it a hesitant shove, but it didn’t budge. Hmm. She trotted a few yards away and leaned against the wall, watching the door.
She didn’t have long to wait. An earth pony trudged up to the door, lugging a wheeled garbage bin behind her. She waved her fetlock at a panel next to the door and it swung open easily; she vanished through it. When it swung closed, Rainbow tried pushing the door again. Locked again. Hmm. She hadn’t caught if the mare had been wearing anything on her fetlock. She waited again, this time for longer. A guard came up and entered after going through the same motions as the handymare. Now that she was looking for it, Rainbow easily spotted the bracelet on the guard’s fetlock and the gem embedded within. It wasn’t large, just… one inch long? One and a half? And it was glowing slightly. Even Rainbow Dash knew it was some kind of arcane key. Clever. It was kinda hard to pick a lock when the lock didn’t physically exist.
But, hey, they had Sunburst and Starlight on their team. They could find a way around this, right? Right.
Rainbow shoved her way back to Lyra and Gilda, but they weren’t there. She checked the entrance, and they were examining a poster. Gilda noticed her and waved her over. “Have you seen this?” Gilda asked, jabbing a claw at the poster.
Rainbow Dash had, but she’d ignored it. Now, she took a closer look at it. Apparently, there was some sort of celebration due in about two weeks, for the tenth anniversary of the casino. It was the usual overblown spiel, promising entertainment, food, games, a big orchestra, all that jazz. It sounded like a PR stunt to Rainbow: an extravaganza for the inhabitants of Trotter Gorge to distract them from… something. “What about it?” asked Rainbow.
“Gilda and I were thinking,” said Lyra. “It’s gonna be pretty busy, right? The guards and staff are gonna be stretched thin trying to handle everything. So if we can get our preparations done in time, this would be a perfect time to-” She twitched and looked around. “You know,” she whispered.
Rainbow’s ears went up and she grinned. “Ooo, yeah. Yeah, that’d be perfect.”
“That’s what we said,” muttered Gilda. She ripped the poster from the wall and rolled it up. “Need some fresh air. Back in a bit. Have fun staring at the guards.” She was out the door before either of them could respond.
“What’s her problem?” asked Lyra. “She hasn’t changed much since she came to Ponyville all those years ago, has she?”
“Nonono, she has!” Rainbow Dash waved her hooves. “She’s not nearly as much of a jerk anymore! At least, she wasn’t the last time I saw her. Maybe- Maybe she’s just stressed! Yeah.”
Lyra gave Rainbow Dash a suspicious look, but then said, “Anyway, Gilda and I kept examining the guards while you were gone, and we saw…”