[Fanfic, 100% OJ] Party Time

Genre: Comedy

Length: 5201 words

B/D: This is the second of the Community Card Art stories, based on Party Time, by Egumi. Congratulations on winning! They've graciously allowed me to do a prompt and link their artwork; if you like the art, be sure to go and give it a thumbs up. This story took me ages -- a little bit of writer's block combined with a somewhat linear prompt combined for a nightmare, haha. It's set in the Mixed Juice verse. Hopefully peeps will still enjoy it as a very silly little thing.

Fernet, despite the trappings of her station, was not a particular fan of cake. This was due, in part, to the fact that cakes and biscuits were diametrically opposed, and biscuits were rather easier to dip in tea without creating an oily surface layer of displaced buttercream in the noble drink. (She was quite adamant, also, that one should not dunk, but dip. A dunk was a surreptitious, hasty movement that was an affront to the dignity of both tea and biscuit, whereas a dip was a deliberate and skilful manoeuvre with the aim of producing a true synthesis of baked good and hot beverage. Dunkers, in her opinion, should be dunked on, as was the parlance of the time).

Of course, this raised the matter of cheesecakes, which were often made with biscuit bases. Heresy was a very strong word and she of course hesitated to employ it, but as it was the duty of the aristocracy to generate employment, she couldn’t avoid doing so. A cake with a crunch, in her humble opinion, was the preserve of childhood bake sales and school festivals; though she had great respect for the cornflake cake as a bastion of crunchy, chocolate-covered nostalgia, she still considered it to be a novelty food, unworthy of regular consumption.

But while there was such things as a birthday bash, a birthday boy and even a birthday boycott, there existed nowhere in the world a birthday biscuit. One day, Fernet had decided, she would change this. She would wrest the chains of status quo from the older generation and set forth a new regiment of social norms, the birthday biscuit amongst them. Her time would come. But it had not come yet, and so, she was in need of a cake. A marvellous, towering, and above all expensive cake with which to flaunt her nobility and persuade the commonfolk, however briefly, to like her. To be sure, there were many that fit an approximation of that description. But she needed the most towering, the most marvellous, and the most expensive (provided that the cost did not exceed her allowance, of course. The tea budget must be preserved).

It was from the unlikely mouth of Krilalaris that she learned of the cake she sought.

Krilalaris also had many opinions on cake. Cakes, as everybody knew, were foci for all manner of good-aligned deities. That was why people built them so high, often with multiple tiers, so they could act as the lightning rods for divine power. As the enemy of all gods except for the really cool evil ones, Krilalaris had taken part in the destruction of many a cake, of all shapes, sizes, and flavours. She liked to show her defiance to godly authority by doing it gradually, slicing off just a small piece and then devouring it before repeating the process until the cake had died a slow, torturous death. Her favourites were the ones with marzipan, because dark science had discovered that marzipan was actually the concealed blood of angels, which accounted for its deliciousness.

“Oh, Krila, you charming thing. Do shut up,” Fernet replied kindly when the lecture was done with. Usually she dealt with her minion’s inanity by clogging her mouth with bean bread, a situation that pleased both parties. Today, Krila had been hungrier than usual, and the bean bread had disappeared into her mouth like a rocket into the event horizon of a ravenous black hole.

Silence was not on Krila’s agenda. Her agenda was too full of things like sedition, heresy and eating for non-essentials like polite communication, or attempting to not look crazy. An infernal fire had been lit in her belly, a fire that could only be quenched by the sweet, fluffy flesh of a victoria sponge.

Sighing, Fernet did something no student had ever done at Ebimanyou High: she reached for her maths homework. With sharp and refined motions, she took her worksheet and folded into a fan, which she then proceeded to clap Krila around the head with. Her aim was to simply hit her hard enough to erase the word ‘dark’ from her vocabulary, but in the event it got her to stop talking, which was as close as made no difference.

“Now, now, Krila. While I sympathise with your hatred of cakes, my aim is to bring one into the world. For that, I shall need a patissier of incredible skill. Rack your brains for one, and if your information is helpful, I shall invite you to my party and you may eat as many slices as your heart desires.”

As many slices as Krila’s heart desired was a very high number, for Krila’s heart desired all of the slices. But moreover, she could not imagine a finer way to blaspheme the gods than the erect a monument to them, only to destroy it later in spite. It was much like playing ding-dong-ditch, only with deities – truly, a dirty and devilish development.

But though she cycled through the vast demonic information matrix, which was in fact lodged like a bullet within her feeble mortal brain, she could not come up with a suitable candidate. The town’s artisan baker, from whom she had snared a great many weak and elderly cakes that had reached their sell-by and were being discounted, had recently turned to the great, divine magic of cake eugenics to make ends meet. They had begun baking holy water into the cakes to preserve them, and Krila wailed with sadness, for while the cakes remained young and strong there would be no discount, and without a discount her stomach remained as empty as her wallet.

But, as she thought more deeply, a possibility emerged in her mind. A delicious, fantastic possibility. She turned to Fernet and put a hand over her one uncovered eye, laughing the laugh of a woman possessed.

“To create the most powerful divine instrument, we must defy the order of the natural world,” she said, lowering her voice an octave so it would have a pleasant boom. “Come, duchess of hell. You shall be Alice, and I shall be your white rabbit. Together, we must see a dog about a girl.”

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There were many things QP had done that she never expected to do, and almost all of them were of dubious legality. Did destroying giant evil robots still count as property damage? Was it legal to take a full-time job as a god of sweets while you were still in high school? What was the law on public indecency, and was it a breach of said laws to wear a dog collar and then have another woman ride you up a mountain?

“Well, I am paying you to be a sherpa, and for my money I expect to be thoroughly sherped. Your role is to make my journey up the mountain as painless as possible, and to allow my feet to become sore would be a breach of your solemn duty,” Fernet explained from her seat on QP’s back. “After all, you can fly, and Krila can fly, and even Syura can fly, but all known laws of aviation declare that I cannot unless I am in my airship, and the deck is being re-varnished at this very moment.”

QP didn’t even know why Syura was there. To be honest, she didn’t know why she was there, although she vaguely remembered being offered four times her monthly allowance. All she knew was that Fernet was very heavy, and that for some reason she insisted on QP wearing a collar with a miniature barrel of brandy attached. Was it legal for her to possess that much brandy? Probably not.

“Ah, but I suppose you must be tired. We have come such a long way, after all. Very well; we shall take turns,” Fernet sniffed, and clambered down from QP’s back. The dog felt her bones breathing a sigh of relief. “Syura, it is your turn.”

“Roger dodger,” Syura said, and immediately climbed up on QP’s back to sit with her legs on the dog girl’s shoulders.

“Syuuuuuuuraaaaa! That isn’t what she meant!” QP groaned. Her back also groaned, as did her stomach. Really, there was just a lot of groaning going on in her life in general. It was the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times.

Krila whirled around and lifted her eyepatch to show off her golden eye of truth. Well, it would have been a golden eye of truth, if she could afford contact lenses. The last one had dropped from her eye onto the floor, to be crushed by a clumsy classmate; soon after, many tears also dropped. “Ufufufu. The dark powers move in incomprehensible ways. You may be a noble beast god, but you should not presume to know the mind of the nobility of hell.”

Syura said nothing because she had QP’s head between her thighs and, save for being a smash hit indie dev sensation, that was more or less all she really aspired to in life. She just smiled the peaceful, all-knowing smile of a buddha, and patted herself on the back for barging her way into the mountain climbing expedition.

Pudding Top Mountain was actually not a particularly impressive mountain. It was famed for having a wide base and a long, flat peak that made it look like an overturned pudding cup, but to be honest it didn’t really get that right, since the peak was actually a higgledy-piggledy mess of contoured rock. It was flat, provided you looked at it from a distance. But then, the point of a needle is flat if you look at it under an electron microscope. There was also a strange divot missing from one side, as if the makers of the universe had reached down with their Great Cosmic Spoon and taken a nibble. Just to check if it was done, of course.

Only QP knew the truth: that Pudding Top Mountain looked half-baked because it had a half-baked deity for an owner. Her name was Sweet Breaker, one of the Gods of Sweets, and if they were going to get the best cake in the world, she was the one to give it to them. Maybe. If things didn’t go horribly wrong, as they were apt to do when Sweet Breaker got involved. Actually QP was pretty sure that this was a terrible idea, but with four times as much allowance, she could buy four times as much pudding.

Luckily, the peak of the mountain came into view before QP’s shoulders gave out, and immediately upon reaching it she reached up and began the involved process of getting Syura off her back. Unfortunately, the red-headed girl had no intention of losing her steed, and closed her thighs together around QP’s neck like a vice.

“Well! That was not such an arduous climb. So, how do we summon this ‘Sweet God’ to parley with us? Is there some kind of ritual we must observe?” Fernet asked. Somewhere in the background, there was a horrible wrenching sound as QP pulled Syura’s legs apart.

“If we channel enough dark magic, all possibilities are within our reach,” Krila replied.

Syura had begun screaming. Fernet, as was befitting of someone with her money and pedigree, studiously ignored it. “I would rather not channel dark magic, if it’s all the same. Whatever happened to negotiations over a cup of tea?”

Krila frowned, deep in thought, before glancing as the fracas taking place behind them. “Oh, I see. The Divine Beast is preparing Syura for use as a blood sacrifice.”

“Hm. Well, if that really is the method, I suppose I can’t argue. Krila, I know I ask a lot of you, but might I ask you to be a blood sacrifice as well? I would hate to appear stingy in front of the gods.”

Nobody knows what Krila might have said, because the hour of reckoning had come. QP, having seized Syura and lifted her above her head, began sprinting forward like a woman possessed. When she reached the rough centre of the mountain, she howled out, with all her fury:

“QP Attaaaaaack! RUNNING POWEEEEERBOMB!”

Syura hit the ground with the force of a small meteorite. The impact shook the foundations of the earth, and drove fear into the hearts of evil. But when the dust settled and Fernet could finally take stock of the devastation, there were three figures instead of two. The newcomer had long, blond hair and a showy multicoloured dress that probably didn’t belong in the realm of fashionable tailoring. When she spoke, it was in a great voice that boomed across the flat peak of the mountain.

“I, Sweet Breaker, have been summoned by the power of professional wrestling! Who dares intrude upon these sacred grounds?!”

It would have been a very intimidating proclamation, if she wasn’t wearing the expression of somebody with food perpetually stuck in their teeth. Or she hadn’t immediately broken out into a raspy cough afterwards. Or if she had been taller, or dressed in some kind of spiked armour. Really, there were any number of ways it could have been more impressive. As Fernet mused on the matter, Sweet Breaker looked down at the two girls sprawled at her feet.

“Nice powerbomb,” she said, and flashed QP a thumbs up. “Next, do a jumping DDT.”

“T-thanks… But I don’t think Syura can take another throw. I don’t want to hurt her brain. She needs it, probably,” QP replied. Syura didn’t reply, and almost certainly wasn’t using her brain at that moment in time.

“What about that one? She has a suspicious look to her.” She jerked her thumb at Krila, who, sufficiently recovered from the shock of what was going on, had begun to march over, presumably to do battle with the divine being woman to woman. Fernet hooked her arms under the girl’s armpits and held her back.

“I can’t DDT Krila,” QP said, aghast. Her ears and tails drooped magnificently. “I feed Krila sometimes. She’s like a pet.”

“Not that I’m trying to dissuade you from dishing out the hurt to our friend here,” Fernet began (having just caught an elbow to the chin), “but why is a god of sweets summoned by wrestling moves?”

“Oh! I know! It’s her superhero origin story. Right?!”

“Yes,” Sweet Breaker replied. “Long ago, before I was a god, I was in fact a professional wrestler. My stage name was ‘Jaw Breaker’. Things got a little bit of hand.”

Fernet reacted to this much the same way she had when she discovered the concept of a nine-to-five job: with mute and horrified acceptance.

“Anyway, we came here on a quest for the world’s coolest cake. Can you help us?”

Sweet Breaker looked down at QP quizzically, the corners of her mouth tugging ever downwards. “You called me here for a cake? You don’t even like cake.”

“I don’t like cake because it’s, like, why would you choose it as a dessert when pudding is available? But Fernet wants one, and she’s gonna give me four times my monthly allowance if I help out.”

“Ehhhhhh? Only four times? Listen. You sit down, and let your big sis handle this.”

There are some telltale signs that a negotiation is going poorly, and one of them is when the person you’re bartering with rolls up their sleeves and starts advancing on your position. There was a moment when Fernet considered releasing Krila as a distraction and then rolling down the mountain to escape, but before she could enact her grand strategy Sweet Breaker was upon her.

“So,” she said, putting a not-at-all friendly hand on Fernet’s shoulder. “I hear you’re ripping off my kohai, huh? Four times her allowance? That’s the smallest of the small. That’s like trying to bribe her with ha’penny sweets, you know? Surely a girl with such a nice, expensive dress and such a lot of meat on her bones can stretch to a little more, huh?”

“Well, I never! How much meat I have on my bones is frankly none of anybody’s business. You have some nerve to come up to me and start talking like… like… like some gangster!”

“Gangster, huh? Well… That’s the nice thing about being called Jaw Breaker. When the fight money stopped coming in and I had to take alternative employment, I didn’t have to come up with a new nickname.”

Sweet Breaker then did the scariest thing she could possibly have done: tried to smile. The result was a twitchy, skittering mess of an expression as she forced her mouth into not being an upside down v, and it protested violently.

“Tell you what. For five times QP’s allowance, I’ll let you walk off this mountain without experiencing my patented Boston Crab hold. For ten, you’ll get your cake, and for fifteen, I will convene the Sweet Gods to collaborate on the paragon of all cakes.”

“And how much, exactly, is QP’s allowance? I didn’t ask earlier. I like to give the impression of unlimited resources, you know.”

“I give her four cups of pudding a week, sixteen a month.”

Fernet did some quick mental maths. “Four by two by four… Wait. You can afford that much pudding with an hour’s work.”

“Half an hour, actually. I buy the cheap ones. It builds character.”

“Oh my. You are a horrible person, and it’s a pleasure to be working with you. I shall have two hundred and forty puddings delivered to QP within the week.”

“Deal. I’ll convene the Sweet Gods tonight after the Hell in a Cell match. Give QP the details about where and when you want it delivered.” She stuck out a hand for Fernet to shake.

With a smile, Fernet reached for the hand and shook it. With a roar, Krila burst from her restraining embrace and hit Sweet Breaker with a right cross that would have felled an antelope. Sweet Breaker was not an antelope. Sweet Breaker was a woman who knew her way around a flying headscissors and was delighted to educate people on the finer points.

Fernet closed her eyes just in time to avoid seeing the inevitable conclusion. But she still heard the crunch when they hit the ground.

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She didn’t believe in luck. Well, she did, but only when it suited her – otherwise she would never be able to tell people that they had gotten lucky when they somehow eked out a victory against her. But generally, she did not believe in it, and did not approve of it, since it couldn’t be controlled by charisma, skill, or money. (She had similar issues with the weather, although trying to argue that weather did not exist in the middle of a thunderstorm had historically gone poorly for her).

But somewhere, probably on the other side of the world, somebody was having a really quite spectacular day. Their toast had landed on the unbuttered side, they had met their soulmate on the train ride to work, and they’d been given a voucher for a theme park that they would never visit but might someday, if they worked hard, come to own. And the reason for all of it was that in the middle of the night, some perfidious spirit had drained all of Fernet’s luck out of her body and injected it into their veins. There could be no other explanation for the train-wreck of a birthday she was having thus far.

To begin with, it seemed that Krila had not distributed the invitations. Certainly, she had mounted an attempt, but she had made the mistake of cosplaying as some sort of ‘dark post-mistress’, and the additional mistake of trying to deliver QP’s invitation first. Thus, reportedly, began a death-defying chase through the city that culminated with a mid-air takedown, all the invitations falling into a storm drain, and Krila walking home with a rather large hole in the back of her shorts.

Then there was the matter of the cake. ‘The paragon of all cakes’ should, Fernet had assumed, be the most cake-like, and most cakes she had seen in the wild were draped in pink, white or cream icing. But no; this one was midnight black, and had fondant icing in the shape of bones that spelled out “HAPPY BIRTHDAY FURNET” on the side. The U had two little dots to make a smiley face, which would have almost been charming under different circumstances.

“Oh, that? Tomomo decorated it. She’s going through a… like, heavy metal granny phase right now,” QP explained patiently. Since she had ruined the invitations, Fernet had pressed her into service as a barker and installed her at the front door to hail passers-by and beg them to take a slice of cake. She wasn’t having a great deal of uptake. Or any uptake, actually. “Sweet Breaker organised it, Tomomo decorated it and put in the secret ingredient, Saki baked it and made sure it wasn’t crazy toxic, and I put the pudding on top.”

Oh yes, the pudding at the very peak of the cake, suspended on a paper plate by some miniature greco-roman plastic columns. It was, she had been told, absolutely necessary, because ‘pudding is better than cake and it needs to establish dominance by being at the very top’. Dessert politics, the dog-girl informed her with a straight face, were serious business indeed.

The only real redeeming factor about the whole thing was that the cake came up to her shoulders, and was refreshingly heavy when they lifted it onto the table. Overall, though, the whole venture seemed to have been a bust. Fernet sat down and sighed, the first step down a path that could only end with her weeping openly into a cup of earl grey. That was how all healthy young aristocrats dealt with their problems.

She was saved from a slow descent into depression by the sound of the doorbell. She narrowed her eyes; the doorbell ringing must mean that somebody had snuck their way past the guard dog. Or, rather, the barker. She dabbed the corners of her eyes with a handkerchief (purely as a precaution), slipped a glass paperweight into her pocket in case of emergency bludgeoning, and strode out to meet them as the woman of the house.

There she found Marc, clad in her workshop apron and with smears of oil in her dirty blonde hair, smiling happily in the midday sunshine. Outside of her plane, she looked happy and serene, as gentle a country girl as anybody could ever ask for, and was currently occupied with scratching QP under the chin. She had that duality about her, Fernet thought; she was at once Marc, a sunflower of a girl who wished only to fly freely, and Red Barrel, the hot-blooded pilot with an almost terrifying zeal for combat.

“Marc… Stooooooooop. It’s embarrassing…” QP moaned. Her eyes were languid and half-lidded, her tail wagging happily. It seemed safe to say that she wasn’t fooling anybody.

“But I tried to take my hand away, and you just put your head in it by yourself…” the pilot replied. She had a hint of country twang about her voice, an open and easy way of speaking. “Oh! Mornin’, Fernet. I flew over to wish you many happy extends.”

She blinked. “You mean many happy returns?”

“Yeah, that too.”

“W-well, I… I do appreciate it, of course. I meant to send you an invite for the festivities, but there was a mishap with the delivery,” she explained. And yet, here was Marc anyway, of her own accord. “You said you flew? Where is the Red Barrel?”

“Aw, I parked it on top of some mall parking lot. I think they’re a little mad because it takes up four bays, but there just aren’t enough fields to touch down in in the city. It’s pretty impractical, right?”

“You may use my lawn, in future. I apologise for my appearance… the day has been going poorly, and I’m something of a state.”

It was true; the corners of her eyes were already red, and between the receipt of the cake and managing the ongoing disaster that was party logistics, she’d had no time to change into her formal attire.

“Ahaha… Don’t worry about it, Fernie. You’re always easy on the eye. I wish I could pull off fancy dresses like you can, but they never suit me, and I’d only get ‘em dirty in the workshop anyhow.”

That was Marc: familiar, friendly, generous with her compliments in a way that so few others were. In the same way as she respected fine piloting when she saw it, she was open in her admiration for strength and beauty elsewhere. It almost never failed to wrong-foot Fernet, and today was no exception.

“W-well. As you’re here, why don’t you come in for a slice of cake? We’ve quite enough to go around, and you can tell me how things are in the country.”

“Cake, huh? Well, I have to admit it’s pretty tempting, but I really shouldn’t. I gotta practice my loop-de-loops when I get back to town, and doing that on a full stomach never goes well. Besides, I gotta watch my weight. If I get too heavy, Red Barrel’ll never get off the ground!” the pilot laughed.

Fernet did not laugh with her. Instead, she dropped her voice half an octave and took a uniquely serious tone. “No, Marc. Let me be frank with you, as we’re friends. I have a cake that comes up to my shoulder, and it is awful, just absolutely horrid. Nobody but you and QP has come to my party, and if I cannot find anybody else to eat this cake, I have a mind to take a hammer and demolish it. You must come in and have a slice, you simply must.”

“Well… I guess there’s nothing stopping me from doing loop-de-loops tomorrow instead,” Marc replied uneasily, and her expression, so open, contained the most naked pity that Fernet had ever seen. In a different circumstance, she would have been extremely offended, but then the only person who would pity her would be herself.

Through the pillars of Fernet’s elegant house they walked, and upon every inlaid table there were flowers, fine cutlery, a basket of fruit. Marc let out a low whistle, unused as she was to extravagance, and QP crowded immediately at her side, as dogs tend to do when whistled for. Neither spoke, because it had become apparent that their host’s temper was frayed and her eye stormy, until they came to the kitchen where the behemoth cake was waiting.

“Well… That, uh, sure is distinctive. I reckon I might take back a slice for that little air pirate girl,” Mark said, examining the black icing and the bone letters.

“You have no idea what I had to go through to get this cake, Marc. It cost me two hundred and forty, for a start. I had to climb a mountain, and negotiate with a divine gangster. Two different people were felled in an impromptu wrestling display. I don’t think I’ve ever worked so hard for something I’ve hated so much,” Fernet explained, her tone chillingly calm. She turned to QP. “You may have the pudding on top, provided that you cut the cake for us.”

QP nodded, both because she wanted the pudding and because she had a feeling that it would be a horrible idea to let Fernet come within six feet of a knife at that moment. Her ears drooped unhappily. “Uh… I know you’re disappointed, but it probably tastes good, at least. Tomomo did the decorating, and I did the pudding, but Saki knows how to do baking.”

“We shall see.”

Nervously, QP selected a knife from the many hanging on the wall of the kitchen, and flew to the top of the cake to begin her slice. She looked with longing, bedroom eyes at the pudding seated at the summit; soon enough, soon enough.

She had cut to about halfway down when the knife suddenly got stuck, as if she had hit bedrock with a shovel. Surprised, she tried to wiggle it a little, and almost felt it come free, when it was jerked out of her hand and fell into the yawning crevasse that she had cut. For a moment, all three girls looked at each other, as if to ask if what they had just seen was real. Then the knife reappeared, bursting point first through the walls of the cake, followed a second later by a ghastly face. A face that was covered in cake innards, a face with blank unholy eyes. A face that did not know mercy.

“Uh, Fernet? Why is Mikky Mouse inside your birthday cake?” Marc asked, a nervous giggle creeping into her voice. “Is this, like… one of those big city cakes, where there’s a girl inside and she bursts out and does a dance?”

QP echoed the giggle. “Tomomo… did say she added a secret ingredient, ahaha… But… the cake went in the oven… how…”

With those cold, dead eyes, with that emotionless smile, Poppo spoke. “Your money or your life...poppo.”

The room was silent. All eyes turned to Fernet. When she spoke, her tone was beatific, as though all her worries had flown away. As if she had been teetering on a diving board above the Olympic-sized swimming pool of hysterical insanity, and had finally made up her mind to do a cannonball. “You know, I’ve decided. As of this moment, my birthday is cancelled. Today never happened! We shall just have a tea party next week. A girl of my means and charisma needs no excuse for a tea party, does she? Marc, you can come, and I will lend you one of my best dresses and you will, for just an afternoon, look like a princess instead of a grease-trap. QP, you will bring pudding to share, and Krila will have sewn up the hole you made in her only pair of underwear and I will ply her with all the sweets she can eat. We shall have tea and biscuits and no cake at all, and we shall be happy.”

It was Marc that first mustered the bravery to speak. “That’s… uh, swell and all, but what about Mikky? She seems pretty serious about the whole ‘robbing you’ thing.”

Fernet strode over to her kitchen draw and patiently rifled through it, eventually extracting a stainless steel meat tenderiser. The spikes on the end glistened wickedly. Fernet’s smile did not move. It was frozen in place, as if her face were made of stone. “It’s a shame, but Mikky wasn’t invited to my party. She’s going away now, so please say your goodbyes.”

Poppo looked at the knife in her hand, which upon further inspection was not so very sharp, and then at the great spiky hammer that Fernet was holding, and then at the way that Fernet was swallowing up the distance the distance between them step by long, sweeping step.

“Oh…poppo.”

So passed another day in mixed up paradise; and so passed another Poppo through the gates. 

A/N: So you can kinda tell that I got really tired of trying to write this story, haha. I did maybe 3000 words in drafts that got canned before I even started this one, and it turned out over-long to boot. I also have exactly no idea how to handle Poppo, Sweebo or any FRB characters. I tried my best, though. I'll write up an analysis at some point and link back to it here, but until then, I hope somebody enjoyed the ride, and that it's not too great a disappointment.