Meanwhile—while we were meaning to taste egg but tasted only the lack of tasty pepper—an ill wind was indeed blowing from the East. East, you see, was just out the window, a little bit to the right of the shrubs. Rhododendrons, these shrubs, and just to the right of them was all of the ill a body could imagine: decked in that preposterous tie-die suit he insisted on wearing, with that hair slicked forward and ending in a wicked point, and those ears like square blocks of cheese—the Ambassador himself! Ambassador Reveveveicez, striding forward (stridently) in the fashion of a man of fashion: pride radiating from a—and I do have to admit—a charming smile and brilliant purple eyes. He took one slapdash look at his sister’s home, at the kitchen at the end of that home and the window into it—the very same window into our present situation pondering pepperless eggs—and he knew at once something was afoot. He knew that about the world, when feet had found their placement or hadn’t. And of course he would know that, being the chief architect of Titanium levitation. So before we could so much as duck—or goose-step our way out of the way of that window—he had practically levitated himself inside and to the kitchen doorway. Before we could so much as flinch he was looking down all funny-like at the floor. Where a likewise funny-looking Chevron looked back at him, squatting, holding the fork. And where Macie and I braced ourselves for the end of everything. And sure enough, everything ended right then and there—the whole of our lives up to that point, just poof in an instant—in one fateful sentence. The Ambassador said: