<br /><br />Awfully Familiar Update

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Monday, November 5

Awfully Familiar Update

“Right, so it’s like this,” said Spindle. “There’s two dogs competing tonight, Billy and Jacko. Billy's the favorite, so we’re gonna bet against Jacko. All of it.”

“All of it?” asked Corwin skeptically.

“All of it. We want to turn this little bag of gold into something larger, right?” Spindle jingled a purse. “So we gotta think big.”

“And in between Billy and Jacko, we give Scrap here a bit of the Modav dust."

"You sure he can handle it?" asked Spindle, concern tingeing his drawn features. "Don't want to waste our best rat right out of the gate."

Corwin barked out a laugh. Spindle didn't join in. "Oh wait, you're serious? I don't think we can keep 'em around, honestly. They'll catch on."

"Well, no use in wasting a good rat…"

"All he's got to do is survive," said Corwin. "If he can do it for long enough we'll be golden."

"But he's just one rat…" began Spindle.

"Nah. We'll tag 'im," Corwin said with a note of finality.

I didn't know what "tagging," meant but I suspected I wouldn't like it.

"But that'll draw attention to 'im!" exclaimed Spindle.

"That's the point. Otherwise he'll just get lost in a sea of rats. Besides, I can't tell him apart from the rest of 'em, can you?"

It was a good point. I took a look at myself, as much as I could, anyway. And I discovered…

That I was pretty much your average rat. Brown fur. Pink tail. No revelations there. I was secretly hoping that I was all black, or maybe all white, or black with a white streak, or flaming pink or something. But no. Just me. Scrap the brown rat.

So much for being different. Not that it mattered, I wasn't long for this world anyway.