As the days went on, there was hardly anything else for me to report. At least, nothing immediately interesting. After a long search, Lucky found Dot on his way outta the willow tree, and when they got back home, that was when the two of ‘em heard the news. After the keyholders dragged Ruby and Libelle’s bodies out of there, Dot kept inside what was now only his room, eatin’ and sleepin’ there all by himself. From then on, it got boring; the keyholders spent five days in what was practically complete isolation, and the associates just spent most of their time sleepin’ in the tree, in what was probably the most lax example of lockup ever; by the time Checker let ‘em out after a day or two, nobuggy even noticed.
That hollow trunk under which they stayed held a bunch of rooms for those associates, as you might’ve guessed, and it was a real big part of what enticed them to join in the first place, aside from Ruby’s promise of more efficient feeding. The room at the bottom of that trunk was reserved for dire emergencies, like a murked keyholder or murked headbug, so they hid down there in what was called lockup. See, lockup and lockdown differed in many distinct ways… Yeah, I don’t care for it, either.
Lucky didn’t do too badly as the new headbug during those five days, but the air was real different. The keyholders and associates were working in their own ways, but Checker had to stay behind and scout; even after an event like this, even after lockup was done, he couldn’t risk leaving his post for a single moment.
Yeah, it was real droopy over there.
“…Dot, c’mon,” said Lucky from outside what was now Dot’s room. “Open up, I… I wanna get some deals movin’ with the fruit flies, and we need you to get involved, c’mon…”
He didn’t budge. Not even I could get any details on what he was doing in there. Lucky, Berry, Sprout, Nino, and Basel were all outside, and they were just left there lookin’ at each other. They knew it must’ve hit him hard, given how long he’d been staying in that exact room, but they didn’t know if he’d stay there forever or what. They went four days without him, no problem, but by day five, it was getting tough. The keyholders then gave up and left him to go forage. Nino and Basel stayed by the entrance.
But before taking off with them, Sprout gave a piece of fruit to Basel. “Don’t forget to give this to him,” he told him quietly, then left with the others.
Call me a buzzkill, but I don’t think Dot deserved that piece of fruit. What did he ever do to earn it?
After Sprout joined them, the three keyholders were out flying that day in search of more fruit, when they came across some pretty huge blades of grass. They were all quite far from the cottonwood by this point, but presumably not far enough to put themselves in any danger, unlike Berry that other day.
“We should split up,” said Lucky.
“Okay,” Berry answered, “I’ll search to the right.”
In that meadow, Sprout killed a few whiteflies, and Berry a few mites of his own. Lucky found some mature aphids, but stayed away just in case, instead preferring to kill off whatever mites Berry couldn’t get. It wasn’t a bad area for scoring prey at all, and they did it pretty efficiently for three keyholder ladybugs.
“I wonder if I could find Dot something, to cheer him up,” Lucky thought to himself out loud as he kept scouring the area for food, “A fruit would be pretty nice…”
Even though Sprout already gave him one? Dot kept on having it easy, I guess.
They were lookin’ left, right, up, down, every direction for even a tiny piece of fruit inside that tall grass, but it was way too hard for the three of them to see in there. I wouldn’t bother to look for food in there myself, not with our food sources. Tiring out a little, Lucky had stopped to catch his breath, but before he knew it, he felt pretty trapped; the grass was taller than he could look up from, and each blade was much too close together for his comfort. He could feel his own breath; Lucky was breathing in and out pretty calm, but it then turnd irregular once he caught the feeling of something gently hitting his wing.
Hooooo. Haaaaa.
He turned his head a little to his side: The side where he felt it. It felt like… air, going in and out at certain intervals, all on that one wing. Then, to the side of his leg… something… wet. He couldn’t know what it was, but he got a little scared; something about it didn’t feel right. After a while of feeling those senses hit him until they got unbearable, Lucky then tried to innocently fly out from where he was.
Big mistake.
STING!
The other keyholders immediately heard the scream Lucky let out and quickly rushed after killing whatever of their own prey they could find. Right as they began to take to the sky, over to the spot where they heard it, they noticed a small bug flying off, moving far away from them to some other locale, turning the keyholders’ looks incredibly distraught: It was a fuckin’ parasitoid.
By the time they reached Lucky, it was far too late. Infected as he was, he crawled with all his force away from the tall grass’ darkness and into open air, where he could breathe easier, as he was practically dying. The two remaining keyholders were so mortified I couldn’t even put it into chemicals.
“L-Lucky! No! N-NO!!” Berry shouted, looking like he was about to die on the spot himself. He couldn’t bear to stare at the toxic saliva spewing out his mouth, same as what he saw before from that other parasitoid.
Berry then knew it pretty quickly: This was revenge for not sparing Oreo.
“Wh-What do we do?!” Sprout looked at Berry, almost panicking while keeping distance from Lucky.
Lucky wasn’t leaking any hemolymph, but drooled out a lot with a viral infection; his underbelly slowly grew, to a horrific size; his limbs broke apart under the weight. It was worse than getting stung and dying right there; when a parasitoid stings you, on top of a contagious, deadly virus, you’re also carrying the weight of a whole larva inside your body.
That poor sap of a keyholder looked really ugly; I would, too, if I had a parasitoid larva inside me who had to shut down most of my organs to eat its way out of my body. By all accounts, Lucky looked like he was ready to go, on top of the gurgling sounds that eventually became his last words.
“I… I…”,. Berry blubbered while quickly finding something to do. “We– We can’t just leave him like this–!”
And he was right. Sad as it was, it was far safer to kill him: No risk of infection, and no risk of a new carrier. In quick thinking, tears still in his eyes, Berry flew over to those grass blades again and found an oak stick. He and Sprout quickly grabbed both ends of it together and stuck it right into his underbelly. Berry closed his eyes, not wanting to see his best friend leaking out like this; Lucky was then gone within seconds, and so was the larva.
Another odd thing: The threat of him infecting them or anybuggy else was taken out suspiciously quickly; it was like those two keyholders were already used to the idea of ‘kill first, cry later.’ As was expected, after some heavy breathing, they definitely cried later.
While all that was going down, Dot finally saw fit to leave his mother’s room. Still completely uninvolved with any knowledge of anything that had gone down in the tree up to this point, his face subtly looked a little different; it was really lookin’ like he’d seen beyond. Nino and Basel knew it was Dot, but that innocent glow he had from before was totally gone now. They looked at him happy that he was out, but a bit disturbed.
“We’re talking to Kelvin,” Dot said, in a tone sounding much more graven than before.
“Dot, you alright?”
“Yeah, Nino, I’m fine,” he said, then turned over to Basel. “What’re you holding?”
“Oh… Sprout wanted me to give this to you,” he said. After giving him the piece of fruit, Dot softened a little. Turning back, he put it inside their room, next to the bed where his mother used to sleep, then, almost as though he really did become a brand new bug, flew out of the cottonwood like it was nothing. Puzzled, the two handlers followed.
“Dot, are you sure you wanna talk to Kelvin? Do you even know what to say?” Basel asked him, looking deeply worried.
Holding back a thought as he flew, Dot didn’t answer until a moment later.
“…Yes, I don’t know why you’re askin’ like I’m doing something bad for us,” Dot said sternly, “I know what I’m doing.”
Bugshit. Slider came in and laughed with us about the meeting after it was over, and soon enough, you’ll see why.
“Your flying’s improved a lot, Dot,” Nino then added, with a smile. “We love to see that.”
Dot didn’t respond to them, leaving the two of them uncomfortable. They knew Dot was acting pretty odd; after five whole days, Dot couldn’t even offer them a ‘thank you’ for complimenting his flying. Even after he whined about it at the table during his first kill. Odd behavior like that was always a peeve of mine and all of us in the burrow, and Dot, in particular, had it down fuckin’ pat.
As the three of them flew down to where we were, our ants immediately came up to carefully watch their movements.
“I… I want to speak to Kelvin,” Dot told them, feeling a little shy and scared, but trying to fight it.
With our ants being all silent as usual, Phido came out from the burrow to confront the intruder, adorably trying to appear as authoritative as he possibly could in front of those ladybugs.
“Kelvin isn’t available,” he told them seriously.
Slider then came out from the burrow to speak, “Ah, Phido, there you are, the queen needs you for somethi–,” he stopped himself after looking Dot in the face.
Dot wasn’t stupid; he knew Phido just lied to his face. Phido himself knew it too, that adorable little ant. Yeah, it was a white lie from us, but so what? It wasn’t as bad as what they were doing to us.
“…I’ll tell her they’re there,” Phido said to them, a bit dejected, “You three stay right there.”
Slider’s look changed after noticing Dot, Nino, and Basel right in front of him, but he just silently went back down once he noticed they were there diplomatically. I always loved the polite restraint our ants had.
As he went down to the burrow to speak to the queen, Phido followed. “My queen,” Phido told her once he was down there, “Dot, Nino, and Basel are at the entrance.”
“I’m aware, the others told me already,” Kelvin said. “Bring him and his friends down.”
Slider was shocked. “My queen, I… You’re going to let them talk with you?!”
“I’ll allow it, I see no reason why not,” she casually told him. “Just subdue them if they get too comfortable.”
Once those three got down to her burrow, Kelvin stared deep into Dot, as she usually did with bugs who wanted to speak with her, to recognize what they were like deep down. Dot naturally appeared pretty submissive; he didn’t recognize this area, but took in how the ants must’ve conducted their work here. In her usual generosity, she matched their emotional tones, as they finally began their first direct talk with each other.
“Kelvin?”
“Yes, Dot.”
“…I’m not sure what to say,” he said, a bit out of breath.
“What would you like to say?”
He remained quiet. He really didn’t know.
“It’s your visit, you’ve the will to say what you want,” she told him.
“…I do?”
She immediately sighed and looked to her right, at me and Slider. We didn’t wanna add anything to their conversation; it felt right that way.
“…Dot, you’re a smart bug, so I won’t play dumb with you… I know what happened last night at the cottonwood, and I have to say I’m very sorry.”
She started crawling around the burrow slowly again; Dot’s eyes followed her around while he remained completely still.
“At times, the forest hardly knows limits to its violence,” she continued.
Dot looked so cold, like he could’ve killed her right then and there, for whatever stupid reason he had to do so.
“Mhm,” he audibly nodded in response. They remained in silence for a bit as Kelvin thought of what to say next.
She turned to him again, “Your mother was a good leader.”
“Lucky’s in control of the cottonwood now,” he told her.
“Why isn’t it you?” She smiled a little.
“Well, I’ve…” Dot stopped, trying not to sound shy. “I still have some things to learn… about myself, about the cottonwood… about what to do with it all.” He sounded unexpectedly mature saying that.
Kelvin thought, then told him, “…Well, it's better to have a leader who can rule after a long wait than to have a leader rushed into power with nothing to offer. Learning is the most important step.”
“I suppose so…”
“I’ll share with you one of the first things I ever learned about: good relationships. They're integral to our affairs as a business, I’m sure you understand. I’ve said it for thousands of days, who you know is everything; who you’re with lets me know who you are.”
“…I’m with the cottonwood,” Dot interrupted. “Been with the cottonwood for… all my life.”
“…I know,” she plainly said. After his awkward disruption, she continued, “But whatever you can maintain, you can build from. We’ve succeeded well enough with our connections to the honeybees, butterflies, cockroaches, parasitoids… you understand.”
His look turned a bit tough. Noticing, Kelvin continued.
“Of course, you can't tend to all the needs of a single colony; that comes with knowing what’s necessary. If a bug comes in to complain about, say, a situation outside their expectations, in essence proving themselves a burden to all their superiors, the issue must be dealt with by how it chooses to present itself. Some things are more necessary than others.”
Kelvin noticed how Dot’s tone turned somewhat emotional after feeling what she said. She then continued, “…I know how hard that can be to grasp yourself, Dot, after having lost your mother.”
He then told her, in an almost pleading voice, “…Is feeling pain necessary? For being kind? For being good?”
Slider and I looked at each other after Dot said that. Kelvin noticed him seeming to break from that mature tone he had before.
“…It depends how evil you are,” she answered.
“How evil am I?” he asked.
She paused for a moment to let the room fall silent. Nino and Basel both felt how tense it got.
“…I can’t answer that,” she finally said.
I remember the look on Dot’s face after she said those words; he looked like he was really deep into his own head, like using all of his brainpower to even think of the next things for him to say. But there was nothing for him to say in that dark, soil-filled burrow, as Kelvin had more to say herself.
“I remember when I spoke to your mother, rest in peace, about the aphids. She brought you along when you were a larva, I’m sure you remember.”
“Yes. I remember.”
Walking around again, she continued, “We were promised that the ladybugs would pose benefits to our business, just as they occasionally had in the past…” she said, looking at the walls of the burrow they were both under. Then, she turned directly at Dot.
“But it appears that there’s been some loopholes.”
I don’t know what it was with those words, or the way she said them, but Dot totally broke the moment she said that. I remember seeing Nino and Basel tremble a little once she said them. Seemingly carrying the entire cottonwood’s weight on his shoulders, Dot responded in what almost felt like sputtering.
“L-Loopholes? I swear, I– I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Kelvin remained dead silent, observing his face even more than before.
“But w-we’ll get our population under control, Miss Kelvin, I assure you. I’ll look into what’s upset you, and I’ll… I’ll put a stop to it.”
Nino and Basel didn’t know what to make of what he was now saying, and neither did we. We all felt the burrow’s air, all of a sudden, turn highly thin, and even more awkward as whatever pressure he felt crushed all of his speech.
“I– I really came here to ask, if it’s possible,” he unfortunately continued, “to lessen the aphid protections a bit further. The– The colony’s in very poor spirits after having lost my mother, you see, and I–”
He looked back at Kelvin while he was speaking, and immediately cut himself off once he noticed the look on her face. We knew damn well; he went far past the point of reasonable accordance. Did this ladybug, to us now merely the cottonwood’s worst possible representative, even know what he was talking about anymore? Our queen’s look matched that sentiment flawlessly.
“W-What?” Dot then questioned her, feeling threatened, as always; we couldn’t believe behavior as shitty as this. Nino and Basel, those fuckin’ yes-bugs, then got up to try to defend Dot, or however they tried understanding how he felt. Kelvin saw the both of them and turned to Slider immediately; we knew that signal.
Four other ants quickly came down to her burrow and grabbed hold of both Nino and Basel, two ants holding each of them back, while Slider immediately restrained Dot. All three struggled for a second, but remained still.
“I… I–”
“Let Kelvin speak,” Slider firmly told Dot, “You don’t bring your bugs down here to treat our queen that way.”
After a painful moment of silence, Kelvin continued while slowly walking around the burrow again.
“Let’s keep things from turning violent, Dot, I know how upset you are. You just lost your mother, so it now falls on us to make you feel better…”
With Slider there to keep him from doing anything sour, Kelvin looked over at the burrow’s walls, then straight into Dot’s face.
“…Well, I’m not in the business of feelings, I’m in the business of survival. And as far as I understand it, Dot, you and your ladybugs have impeded on our business. Simply put, we can’t have that. As much respect as I had for Ruby, she handled our peace deal like a bee inside a flytrap.”
Dot, catching a genuine flicker of anger by that point, grew far angrier the more she talked, but Slider held him back perfectly still. He looked into Kelvin’s eyes with a look of both bitterness and fear for the safety of his tree, which Kelvin saw dead-on.
“…No, I won’t be making any more deals with you, that’s what’s going to happen to your tree. To me, you no longer exist; I therefore won’t go after anyone in your colony, but don’t you go after anyone in mine.” she told him firmly, in that deeply serious, terrifying tone I only ever heard on the day she sent Jammy away. With Dot shuddering on Slider’s tarsal claws, Kelvin then restrained it and continued.
“…You understand, Dot, that war tires out my resources. So I need your assurance that it won’t happen. I’ll know if it does… but I don’t want it, and I’m very sure you don’t want it either. Can you manage that?”
With nothing left to say, he had to agree to it. Served him right; we outnumbered his ladybugs beyond his wildest guess.
“…Yes.”
“Good. I appreciate it. Slider, let them go.”
Nino, Basel, and Dot were then freed from their constriction, too exhausted emotionally to even try to do something else against us. With our ants still close by them, they defeatedly crawled out. “Thank you for understanding, I won’t keep you any longer,” Kelvin finished, watching them fly out one-by-one.
See why we laughed now?
As that large light ball in the sky finally began to set, the three stopped at nothing to leave the burrow. They flew back into the sky, Dot much shakier, over to the cottonwood, with terror all on their faces. Dot’s look was especially pensive, and almost completely sunken. He could hardly focus on his flying; he was quaking over us and what we said, yeah, but emotionally, he was caught onto something else. He then stopped to tell Nino and Basel, “…You both go ahead, I’ll meet up at the tree later. I don’t want to go back there now.”
Equally worried for Dot, the two handlers went back on their own.
“I… I still need to practice flying,” Dot said in front of them as they flew off.
But that fuckin’ ladybug wasn’t practicing shit; he was just flying around that night looking for Ivy’s tree with tears in his eyes.
Wh-What the fuck was the point of a discussion like that?! Frustration? Fear? What was the point? What release could I get from this? What was it again that Ivy told me… Thoughts like those were what circled his head, all throughout his lonely flight from tree to tree, high up in that dark sky.
His pensive looks shifted in phases as he flew past the rest of the forest. He was thinking, that willow tree must’ve been somewhere; with his experience with Ivy replaying in his head, he was following any possible trace of her scent, her pheromones. That addiction he had was only getting worse; he flew around in all these directions, making lots of twists and turns, without a fuckin’ clue where he was actually going. Great use of those flying skills…
He looked up to see those dark, gaseous shapes in the sky from where rain usually came down. Looking back down, his head held less thoughts. Less thoughts would’ve been nice for him, as opposed to those that kept looping the best bygone day of his life. He was thinking he needed a night like that again.
“Ugh… Ugh… Urgh…”
But in his lonely flight, all he could sense was a faint, unrecognizable groan from below, and with a powerful hesitance, he flew back down to see what it was. He knew it came from a bug, but what the hell kind of bug makes sounds like those?
“The… The forest…”
It was a termite: a leaking termite, losing an alarming amount of hemolymph that only looked worse as Dot swooped down. It was quite a large bug; she had the size of a queen, and was able to pull together for her life, in a desperate crawl away from whatever colony made her home. The closer he got to her, the less he could see.
“The forest… takes us all… in the end…” she was muttering.
After catching her muttered words, he got close enough to that termite queen to feel the air surrounding her. Around her were dark, tall trees that left almost her whole body and the surrounding areas covered in shadows, with only the light of those tiny white bugs in the dark sky illuminating her in darkness; he could barely see a thing, but he saw her face. The air around this leaking, dying queen smelled horrible; for him it was like the complete opposite of the feel of Ivy’s pheromones, or the pheromones he was used to back home. And that’s coming from a bug who spent five days in a room with the scent of his dead mother.
Scents can tell you a lot about where you are.
The termite queen’s voice held a deep somberness to it; the two of them spoke with substantially wide pauses.
“What happened?” Dot asked her.
“Were you also… born on the losing side?” she asked him back. Those words hit Dot particularly hard because, of course they did. He’s a sap.
“…I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You stopped to see me,” she said.
“…”
“…It was an ant,” she finally answered. “I think his name was… Jammy. I watched him tear up our entire colony, all by himself, knowing we were friendless, so no one would care… The poor thing looked like he was crying… He since took his own life.”
“…I don’t know who he is.”
“I remember what ladybugs like yourself said about the ants. What has the forest said about you?”
“…I don’t take my orders from them,” he answered. “This forest wants us dead. They don’t deserve my obedience.”
“Then who does?” she immediately tilted her head to address him directly.
“…”
“What do you deserve?”
He looked around at the grass, seeing it was a few shades darker than he’d ever seen it before. He then turned to his side, brushing her off.
“…This is ridiculous. You’re insane.”
“What do you understand about power, Dot?”
I have no idea how she knew his name.
And neither did he; his body language shifted.
“…I run an enterprise. My strength comes from the cottonwood; I’m obedient to them. Nowhere else. Certainly not from you.”
“How far are you now from the cottonwood?”
He paused. “…I’m not sure.”
She noticed his hesitance, more than she noticed (or cared about) the fact that she was slowly dying.
“Are you afraid? Afraid of what you’ve built?”
“…No.”
“Do you like your fears?”
“…What?”
She asked him again, “Do you like your fears?”
“…No. I don’t know who could.”
“That ant did. He feared us, but won power. Your power turns… sad, when you build against your fears.”
Dot couldn’t respond to that.
“Are you sad?”
“My mother is dead,” he told her with a blank voice, hardly any emotion in him anymore. She paused out of respect.
“…It happens.”
“What?”
“Death always happens… It happens in spite of us.”
“…”
“Some day you will learn, Dot, that as an insect, we don’t die for a cause other than another insect’s will. We die out of spite. When you live, your life happens… not out of spite. It doesn’t happen for you, either. When you live, it happens against you.”
Dot felt his face start to drown out of any possible semblance of emotion as she kept on speaking. The termite queen continued, still losing a lot of her hemolymph in the process.
“An important difference exists between the living and the dead, Dot. When you’re here, there’s a point where you’ll wish to be somewhere else. But when you’re gone, you won’t have a mind… a mind begging to take it all back. That’s death.”
“…”
“We kill. We change lives every day. But… death is easier than you think when there’s… nothing left to do…”
“…You’ve… You’ve lost your mind,” Dot backed away from the termite queen, ready to fly back to the cottonwood, but he looked around at the shadows surrounding him. He found that he really couldn’t see anything anymore.
“…Are you a hero?” she panted for her breath, “What do you… search for?”
Dot felt weaker once the leaking termite queen slowly began to ask him that. It was easier for him to stare at her leaking, shadow-obscured face than to answer her questions. The longer Dot stared at her pale, flaking skin, the less he could see her leaking out.
But this was all while that half-dead termite queen was staring him down, too, then closing her eyes. She crawled weakly to those pitch-dark trees surrounding her, as if she knew exactly where those trees were, and spoke even slower than before.
“Do you understand… heroes and murderers? Food… as food… created by… food…?”
“…I don’t follow.” He calmly told her while watching that termite queen hold her ruptured guts in.
After Dot said that, she just kept on speaking: Elaborating, as if talking directly to those dark trees, with the most calm voice a bug could’ve ever heard. Dot’s expression never changed.
“You and that… ant, the one that… killed me… Your leading forces are both in conflict. That’s what I understand. Like many in this forest, I… pity conflict. But in place of achieving an outcome, they act strange, they… kill whatever isn’t the outcome… and they take everything else. For them.”
Dot noticed, while the termite queen was talking, she was crawling over what looked like large bumps on the ground, but the ground was much too dark for him to see what she was crawling over, all while leaking out every bit of hemolymph she had left.
“…With nothing else left of them to understand, I… look at the motives. Where you’ve seen deaths, Dot, I’ve seen motives. I see no outcomes.”
She slowed down her speech as she felt her leaking body reach its limits. Dot just watched her, still completely emotionless, his face completely tired.
“You’ve seen… victims of yourself, in all the lies… in all the disobedience… You want… no obedience to this forest, but… right now, the… the forest likes you. If the forest despised you, they would’ve killed you… You’d be dead. I know, because you’re still breathing.”
Dot fell into silence as they kept on studying each other’s looks.
“Why do you treat the forest so?”
He looked straight at the ground after being asked that. He couldn’t look in her same direction anymore, nor answer her question. Again, his expression never changed.
He couldn’t speak to her.
“Your colony, Dot, all the colonies… The forest extends beyond them. And nothing goes beyond the forest, except the sky, and the sky is empty… You know it… but you can’t accept it. But if you can see yourself without lies, without disobedience… then you can find yourself in… what you despise. You find love in… what will end you… and it will all end flareless and blind… It will all end flareless and blind…”
He finally looked up at her once she finished talking. Before he knew it, she was gone.
Dot found himself completely alone among the dark trees, with only the look of this dead termite queen keeping him company. From the small glimmer of light on her face, she died looking almost happy, like she understood everything that was going on around her, but only once it was over.
Dot then saw some fireflies appearing from out of the trees, one by one, emitting soft lights. He saw how they outlined the termite queen, while also outlining some of the other bumps she was crawling over. Dot recognized one of them as the fireflies illuminated, and backed away shaking. The fireflies gathered in bunches to reveal around a hundred leaked-out termites, dismembered and spread all across the ground. They were already gone, as casualties of that little massacre, yet surrounding their queen’s own now-dead body. These were what the queen was crawling over, while losing her life over an insane worship of the forest.
Shaken to his core, Dot flew back to the cottonwood immediately, not even curious about where the willow tree was anymore, let alone where Jammy’s body was.
Speaking of that sap, we had actually been looking for that sap’s whereabouts in all this, so we’re quite grateful that Dot went over there. Of course, I and a few other scout ants were still tracking him after the embarrassing meeting he had with Kelvin, but we weren’t sure if Jammy was where we last left him until that exchange.
I’m glad Dot was dumb enough to speak to someone like her; we were able to dig Jammy’s body out.
Thanks, Dot!