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"Family" Dinner

     | R O O M _ F I F T Y _  T W O |

"IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIITTT'SSS DINNER!" cried Rush, scrambling through all the rooms, "GO TO ROOOOOM 40!"

Halt poked her head out of her hallway. "Yeah yeah, genius. I know." Jack opened the doors of his closet just as Rush came past, almost snapping the doors off their hinges. Timothy sat undeterred on top of the closet.

As everyone piled into Room 40, Figure, a large entity with no eyes and a giant, teeth-filled mouth, was blindly brushing off any junk off the table. Seek managed to catch a vase before it was knocked off by Figure's long, pipe-like arms. "Careful there, Figure," said Seek, yawning. "You're lucky I got some sleep last night." he took the opportunity to flash a glare at Ambush, Rush and Jack, who shrugged back. 

Figure nodded and then went crashing into the kitchen. The Eyes, Halt and Rush came in with them. Jack sat watching from the kitchen door, while the other entities were setting the table up. Once they had finished getting the table ready, they sat waiting  for the others to prepare the food. Seek nervously drummed his fingers on the plate in front of him. "Do you think they're doing all right in there without me?" He looked at Jack, who had his back to them, watching the other entities in the kitchen. "Jack! Are they doing okay?"

Jack swiveled around to face the table, blocking the door. "What? Oh, yes, they're doing fine."

"I told you, three eggs! I draw the line at three eggs!" Halt squawked.

"Four, pleeeeease?!" Rush stood behind Halt and gave her his most innocent look yet. Figure and Halt both shook their heads, but The Eyes, leaning on the counter behind them, didn't. "We can't do four eggs, okay? That wouldn't taste good. But you can crack them. Here," they said, and gently tapped an egg on the edge of the counter, dropping the contents into the bowl. "Try it."

"Okay!" Rush, being his usual over-excited self, hastily cracked the other two eggs and then held the shells over the bowl, only for nothing to come out. Halt looked at the floor and sighed. The eggs' yolk and whites had fallen onto the floor.

Jack turned around and went, "Oi! You better be quick, and make sure everything's cooked!" Figure's stomach grumbled and it went to the cabinets, looking -- or making a mess, rather -- to find something to eat. Naturally, Figure was a carnivore, but the problem was, there was no meat. It would have to settle for eggs instead. 

"Well, one egg it is, then." Halt grumbled, "Ugh, Rush, you're really immature."

"No I'm not!" Rush said, getting angry, "I just dropped them because The Eyes told me to crack them and it was an accident and I didn't know!"

Figure made a low growling noise, letting them know it was still present and that it didn't like them yelling. Halt and Rush both went quiet as The Eyes took over the bowl. "While you two are at it, why don't you just do the sauce?"

Screech, who was at the table, started getting impatient. "Are we gonna have any food or not?" It had been 45 minutes and everyone was getting hungry.  Outside, a tree branch started tapping on the window from the wind. Everyone stayed still. No one talked, unless the tree counted.

Tap. Tap.

Jack still had his back to them, obviously implying that something was going on in the kitchen. A few more minutes of awkward silence passed.

Tap. Tap. 

"Hey, what about we play a game?" asked Ambush, "I'll get this fork, and put it under this plate..." she grabbed the two other plates from next to her and then put them all upside down in a row, and then put the fork under the middle plate. "There! Now I'm gonna shuffle these and then you all guess which one the fork is under." She then proceeded to shuffle the plates in a blur, before she arranged them back in a line in front of her. "Guess!"

Seek let out a resigned sigh. "It's the middle one, isn't it?"

Ambush lifted up the plate. "Good guess!"

"It wasn't a guess," said Screech, "That plate is higher than the other ones because the fork is under it." This caused Ambush to set the plate down, disappointed. "Aww..."

"I know, let's play Truth or Dare!" said Screech, who was a master of causing mischief. "Seek gets asked first!" Seek looked to Screech, confused. "What do I do?"

"Well, I ask you 'Truth or Dare' and you need to pick one! Truth means we can ask you something and you have to tell the truth. Dare means we can ask you to do anything and you have to do it! So, Truth or Dare?"

"Okay..." Seek sighed again. "I pick Truth." Screech grinned his usual trademark trouble-maker grin. "What happened to Glitch?"

Seek paused, not sure what to do. Another silence session descended on the room. Seek coughed and looked around. "Fine, I pick Dare."

"Okay then, I dare you to tell us what happened to Glitch."

Seek became very interested in the floor. "She just... did something wrong, is all. She had to leave."

Suddenly, the entities in the kitchen came crashing into the dining room, coughing. A thick plume of smoke followed them, and the entities at the table stared on in shock.

"Remind us to keep the oven off until we actually need it," coughed Halt, while Rush excitedly shoved a plate onto the table for all to see. On the plate, well, was a charred, messy and very odd-shaped mound of...something... being drowned by red sauce and a few shreds of something foul-smelling lazily placed on top.

"Uhm...we're not very good at this," said Eyes, chuckling nervously. Screech poked the strange mass, making a very disgusted face. "What's it even supposed to be?"

"Pizza," said Rush and The Eyes in unison. "Cool, but I bet I would have done something way better with it..." said Screech, chuckling to himself and rubbing two tentacles together menacingly, trouble-maker style.

Even Figure didn't look like it wanted to touch it. "Okay," Ambush said, "We'll...try it... right guys?"

"NO!" Everyone cried.

___________+__________

And now, a short message from the Guiding Light.

They remember Glitch..?