"She’s no better," Luna murmured quietly, then tapped Amok on the shoulder with her crop. "Go to her bed, Amok. Let’s try to bring down her fever with the ice packs now." Amok grunted and obligingly went over. "Now, turn her over so she’s on her back, we can reach her pulse points more easily that way," she instructed her steed. He raised his free hand and pushed the unconscious Lunatac gently at the shoulder. Chilla’s unclothed and limp form rolled over onto the sheets without her so much as fluttering an eyelid at the movement.

If Amok had a reaction to her nakedness he didn’t show it. Of all the males in the place, Luna figured, and correctly so, that Amok would be least likely to display awkwardness of any kind about it. He was so loyal to Luna, and so accustomed to his current lifestyle of serving her, that thinking of Chilla in such a way would simply never occur to him. "Place some of the ice against her neck on either side, Amok. And on her wrists," Luna said, as she re-bagged the ice into smaller packs so that there would be more of her. He did as she asked, and placed the ice carefully in each place she told him too. Chilla did not move or react, but Luna hadn’t really expected her to. RedEye had shaken her by the shoulders about an hour ago and it hadn’t roused her.

Luna passed Amok two more packs. "Now move her legs and place these behind the kn—" she cut herself off with a loud gasp, while Amok’s hand, already lifting Chilla’s right leg, froze in place.

The sheet and insides of her legs, previously concealed by the position in which she’d been laying, were smeared and coated with blood.

"Oh, gods," Luna said, her large eyes widened further with shock. The blood was not coming from a cut, but from inside of her. It was not a sight that she was prepared for. Unlike females of other species, Lunatac females did not bleed as a part of their own fertility cycle. Therefore the presence of any blood, especially that much, was an indication of something terribly wrong.

Immediately she had Amok bring her over to the intercom, and she paged the laboratory. "Alluro!" she nearly shrieked into it. "Alluro, answer me, this is important!"

A few seconds later Alluro’s voice sounded over the speaker. "What is it, Luna? Is it Chilla?" Elements of both alarm and irritation could be heard in his tone.

"She’s bleeding."

"Is she cut?"

"No," Luna replied. "It’s internal. You need to come up here and look at her now."

There was a momentary lapse, and then Alluro spoke again, the irritation in his voice now replaced with genuine worry. "Internal? I’ll be right there."

Downstairs Alluro closed the intercom connection and immediately started for the door. As he passed by the bench he’d been working at he glanced again at the stone he’d been analyzing, now cut and sliced into fragments for analysis. He hadn’t been able to determine much from the small sample. All he did learn was that the chemical structure of parts of it appeared to have been organic in nature at one point, but that they’d been fossilized—presumably by Mumm-Ra’s spell. What exactly they might have been, or why they might have been in TugMug’s stomach was still a mystery.

The only even somewhat plausible theory he’d come up with, other than the possibility that TugMug might have ingested the stone himself, was that perhaps something went awry in Mumm-Ra’s spell that might have resulted in fossilization of some of the body tissues. It seemed impossible and it was a long shot at best, but it was the best he had come up with, and when he thought about it, it would explain the symptoms the afflicted Lunatacs were suffering.

He’d been in the process of setting up the scanning machine—a piece of equipment he made from the design of Skytomb’s landscape scanners a few months back for the purposes of examining for internal injuries and tissues—to find out if his theory was correct when Luna’s call had come. Grateful for the cue to his memory, Alluro paused by the bench long enough to collect the scanner and its power source in his arms before he headed upstairs. Hopefully it would be able to tell him what he needed to know to help Chilla, and afterward, TugMug.

Alluro reached Chilla’s door only to find it sealed. He tried to open it, a somewhat difficult task with the cumbersome machine in his arms, until Luna must have heard him and had Amok open it for him. Alluro hurried in and set the machine down on the foot of her bed. It was only then that he glanced in the unconscious Chilla’s direction and saw the blood. Immediately he felt a sickened sensation in the pit of his stomach and turned away. When Luna had said she was bleeding, she hadn’t said where, and it wasn’t what he’d anticipated… though now that he thought about it, he wasn’t sure what he had expected to see really. Once he got his bearings, he switched on the scanner and handed Luna a damp cloth from the nearby nightstand. "Clean as much of the blood off her skin as you can. I’m going to try and use this on her and I can’t have the sensors getting dirty," he said abruptly.

Luna took the cloth and handed it to Amok, who obediently set about the task. "What is it?" she inquired, looking at the machine.

"Remember when you fell off of Amok’s back and landed on your wrist a couple months ago, and you thought it was broken?" he replied, referring to an incident that had happened not long after Skytomb was first constructed.

Luna nodded.

"This is the machine I used to find out if your bone had been fractured or not. It’s not exactly medical equipment, but being that I’m not a qualified physician, it’s about as close as I could build with my own biology and engineering knowledge," he explained. "My analysis of the rock TugMug threw up led me to believe that there might be some tissue within their bodies that’s either producing stone or being turned into it as a side effect of Mumm-Ra’s spell, so I brought this out to find out if indeed there is residual stone in their bodies. And given this," he alluded to Chilla’s bleeding, "I think we’ve got no time to lose. If there is stone inside her that’s big enough to cause internal bleeding, it’s imperative that we locate and get rid of it immediately."

He flipped a few switches, connected the probes, and gestured for Luna and Amok to move back. Amok gave Chilla’s leg one final pat with the cloth and stepped back so Alluro could slide in next to her. He placed one probe on each side of her belly, the area from which she had complained of the most pain.

Slowly an image took form on the monitor. Alluro could make out the shape of her intestines, and throughout them were several pockets of solid material that did not look like food. He switched the setting for a color, weight, density, and projected analysis on the substance. "Tissue detected in sample area: Inert material," the screen read. The density, weight, and color properties were nearly identical to those of the stone sample he’d analyzed earlier. "It’s stone," Alluro said with shocked disbelief. "Her intestines are filled with stone."

"What?" echoed an equally shocked Luna.

"Just what I said. There’s rock deposits all throughout her GI tract," Alluro said, becoming panicked as he slid the probe upwards. Her gut was riddled with the fragments of stone, most very small and smooth, rounded and oblong in shape. "It’s everywhere." He looked for her stomach. When he found it, he saw a few smaller chunks of rock sitting against the stomach wall.

Luna shook her head in disbelief. "But where did it come from?" she asked, perplexed. "She doesn’t eat rocks. TugMug doesn’t eat rocks either! It couldn’t have just spontaneously formed there!"

A strange thought, startlingly similar to the one that had struck Tygra miles away not long before, now occurred to him. "Oh no," Alluro said aloud, comprehending the complexity of the problem if what he was thinking was true.

"What?" an impatient Luna pressed.

"It’s what she ate," he explained. "Everything she ate, everything in her entire GI tract, it’s stone. It must have been changed along with her when she was turned into a statue by that damned Mumm-Ra, but when the spell was broken for some reason it didn’t change what she ate back. That has to be it. I’ll bet that when we check TugMug we find the exact same thing."

"But… but why wouldn’t the food change back if the rest of her did?"

Alluro clenched the probe in frustration. "Don’t ask me what the hell Mumm-Ra’s magic does or why it does it! It’s probably because he’s an incompetent fuck-up at his own spells, and this is a result of it," he snapped angrily, then took a deep breath and regained his composure before continuing. "The only guess I can make is that it was only what was actually her that got changed back when they restored, leaving what wasn’t her—in this case what she had eaten—as the stone Mumm-Ra changed it to."

Luna let the explanation sink in. "All right, that would explain the heaving and the stomach pains… but what about the fever? And all that blood?"

"Fever could be caused by a number of things. Commonly it’s a side effect of infection. With all this foreign matter littering up her system, it’s little wonder her body is reacting as though it’s in the throes of a terrible infection, because it is. It’s an infection of stone. As for the blood, I’m guessing that one of these larger fragments here—" he repositioned the probe over an area that showed a large and irregularly shaped rock in her large intestine "—likely cut the tissue it’s been abrading against, and sliced through a blood vessel, hence the blood from her colon."

"But Alluro," Luna said quietly, "that’s not where the blood is coming from," she pointed out as delicately as she could without spelling it out. Alluro raised an eyebrow and met her expression with a surprised, if not uncomfortable, look of his own, and Luna confirmed his silent inquiry with a nod.

"But… why?" Alluro wondered aloud. He forced himself to think of the matter in plainly medical terms, and no others. "If it’s only what she ate that was fossilized, then what could cause this?" He drew the scanner probe over her abdomen slowly, watching the screen carefully for anything out of the ordinary. He found several more stone deposits, but like the others they were all contained within intestinal tissue. There was no indication for her bleeding—until he came across what appeared to be a very small stone embedded more deeply inside her.

Frowning in puzzlement, he adjusted the settings for a better focus on the rock fragment, only this time he set it on a slightly wider range, including a good inch of the area around it, and set the machine to analyze as he had earlier. When the analysis flashed on the monitor, he froze in cold shock.

The screen read, "Tissues detected in sample area: Uterus, Inert Material."

"Gods," Alluro breathed, his own mind reeling at the implications.

Luna also read what had appeared on the screen. Her eyes drifted from the readout to Alluro’s face. "Does… does that mean she’s pregnant?" an equally stunned Luna questioned.

Alluro blinked, and met Luna’s eyes. "No, Luna," he said softly, an unreadable expression on his face. "It means she was… until that spell turned the child within her to stone."

The ride back to Cat’s Lair, which had felt too long to Tygra on his first trip, felt even longer on the second. He prayed that he would make it back in time before either Panthro or Lion-O got worse. He had not heard news otherwise, and that was a small comfort, but his worry would not ease until he was actually there to see for himself.

When he did finally arrive a very worn-looking Snarf greeted him. "Oh, snaaarf, I’m glad you’re back Tygra. Lion-O and Panthro haven’t gotten any worse, but I sure don’t think they’re getting any better either. We need to do something for them and soon. What did you find out at the funeral ceremony?"

Having also heard the Thunderstrike land, Cheetara, Pumyra, and the kittens hurried out to greet Tygra as well. "Tygra!" Cheetara exclaimed. "Were you able to learn anything at the funeral?"

"I think so."

"You can cure them then?" WilyKit asked hopefully.

"Tell us," Snarf insisted. "I promised Bengali, Lynx-O, and Snarfer that I would let them know the second there was any news. They’ve been just as worried as we are."

"All right," Tygra said. "I went to the Tree Top Kingdom, but as I told you earlier Nayda would not allow me to do an autopsy on Willa, as it’s against their beliefs. She did invite me to the funeral, so I stayed. As it turned out, it was a cremation ceremony. After they…" his voice trailed off slightly "…carried it out, large stones were found among her ashes. Stones that were inside her body."

"Stones!" gasped Snarf. "Brrrr… and Lion-O and Panthro have both been sick with stones or traces of it."

Cheetara’s eyes widened in surprise. "Those came from inside her?"

Tygra nodded. "There was no other place from which they could have come. Nayda told me that the pit was bare dirt and wood without a rock in sight when the fire was lit."

"But how?" WilyKit inquired. "Those are big rocks. Do humans have rocks inside them?"

"Yeah," WilyKat added. "Like those gizzard things I’ve read about in some biology books?"

"No," Tygra corrected him, "Humans don’t have those. There is no biological reason for a rock to be inside the body unless it was eaten or—"

"Eaten?!" Snarf exclaimed. "Snaaaarf! Are you saying that Willa ate rocks that big?" he asked incredulously.

Tygra shook his head. "No, that would be nearly impossible physiologically." He held up the largest stone. "But look at it…see how if you look at the unusual texture and shape, pieces of it look like candyfruit skin?" The others around him nodded. "It got me to thinking… and then when Nayda made a comment that Willa had a feast of candyfruit that morning, it occurred to me—what if what was wrong with her, and what is wrong with Lion-O and Panthro, is that when they were turned to stone and back, that the food in their systems, that which was not part of their own cellular structure as it were, remained fossilized?"

Cheetara frowned in puzzlement. "You think that’s why they’re so sick, that the food that was in their systems turned to stone and is poisoning them somehow?"

"That’s exactly it," Tygra confirmed.

"Wow… how do we get it out? Surgery?" asked WilyKat.

Tygra closed his eyes and sighed. "I hope not. Neither Pumyra nor I are really qualified to do that. She’s the one with medical training, but I don’t think it goes that far. Anything we did would be highly experimental for us, and because of the risk involved, I’d say a very last resort."

WilyKit gulped. "Risk? But…" her voice trailed off as she struggled to understand.

Pumyra put a hand on the kitten’s shoulder. "I’m going to be honest with you here, WilyKit. If Tygra and I operate, our lack of experience could very well result in serious complications… serious enough that they could even die if we tried."

"Then what can you do?" WilyKat asked.

"That’s what I need your help for," Tygra said, straightening a bit as he addressed the group of them once more. "I’ll need to run X-rays on both of them as soon as possible so I can find out where these stone deposits are. Cheetara, I can use your help in getting the machine operational. In the meanwhile, I’m going to need a lot of oil. Snarf, do you have a jug or two of cooking oil you might be able to spare?"

Snarf stood up on his tail. "Well sure, snarf snarf, I have a whole lot of it."

"Good. I’ll also need some tubing and anything labeled as a solvent. Anything you can find might be helpful. Kittens, do you think you could go through Panthro’s workshop and find that for me? Also I’d prefer the tubing be clean as possible. In the meanwhile Snarf I want you to find the oil and also boil a few pots of water. I’ll need to sterilize some equipment. Lastly Pumyra, if you could go up and check on Panthro and Lion-O while we do all this, that would be a big help."

"No problem Tygra," Pumyra agreed, and headed upstairs. WilyKit and WilyKat also both nodded in agreement to Tygra and dashed off to Panthro’s workshop. Snarf hurried for the kitchen to fill the pots and get the oil, while Cheetara followed Tygra to the lab.

Once there, Tygra found his x-raying device and set about modifying it for the purposes they would need it for upstairs. Unfortunately the machine wasn’t as portable as he would have liked, and he definitely didn’t want Panthro or Lion-O being moved too much, lest a stone rupture some internal organ and do damage that he and Pumyra would have no chance of healing. He took out his tools immediately and set to work on it, and with some help from Cheetara it wasn’t too long before finished the necessary modifications. He then gave the machine to Cheetara with instructions to have her and Pumyra set it up on Panthro.

Right after Cheetara left Tygra then set about studying a fragment of the rock to ascertain its chemical structure. Since he had no way of easily breaking it apart, he decided that dissolving the rock and allowing it to pass through or otherwise come out naturally would be the best strategy. It wasn’t long before the Thunderkittens came in and showed him what they had found in the lab—about twelve feet of unused hosing for repairing the Thundertank, and about fifteen bottles of chemicals. He told them to cut the hosing into four foot sections and have Snarf boil them. The kittens did as he asked and left the room as quickly as they came.

Meanwhile Tygra formulated a solution from the materials he had available that would ideally dissolve the stone but not do further internal damage. It took some ingenuity and plenty of help from his computer to run the analyses, but eventually he was able to come up with a formulation that disintegrated samples of the stone with minimal production of toxic by-products. He figured that with the aid enough oil to lubricate the gastrointestinal tract and an accurate dose of the formula, calculated by the estimated size of the stones which he would determine by the results of the X-rays, that it would do the trick. At least he hoped in the name of all the gods of Thundera that it would.

About an hour and a half altogether had passed when the group of them assembled in Panthro’s room to try what they hoped would be the cure. The decision to cure Panthro before Lion-O was made out of necessity, while both were sick, Panthro was in worse condition, with a higher fever and spasms more violent and frequent than Lion-O’s. At Tygra’s instruction Cheetara and WilyKat set the X-ray machine over Panthro’s midsection and initiated the scan. Tygra and WilyKit watched the screen, and were horrified to see large unidentifiable solid masses in his stomach, and a few smaller ones in his intestines.

"Oh my gods!" exclaimed the female kitten. "That’s all stone isn’t it?"

"I’m afraid it probably is," Tygra said. "But the good news is the worst of it’s in his stomach. If this solution works, then we’ll know very soon. Cheetara, can the machine be rested there?" he asked. Cheetara nodded back an affirmative. "Good. Pumyra, can you use the sterilized hose to set up a stomach tube? I’m going to try and calculate about how much of this he’ll need."

"I’ll do my best," Pumyra replied, and with a gloved hand pulled the stomach tube from the once boiled, now cooled, water. She had WilyKat and Snarf each hold down one of Panthro’s arms to keep him from moving while she carefully opened the mouth and slid the tube gently into the unconscious panther’s throat. Once the tube was in place and Tygra measured a certain amount of his treatment and poured it into the tube. Pumyra then followed it with a liberal amount of the oil, until she was certain it had been washed down. "All right now, sit him up," Pumyra told WilyKat and Cheetara. "If this makes him throw up, we don’t want him choking on it," she explained as she pulled out the tube.

Cheetara and WilyKat eased Panthro upright, and the motion was enough to jostle the groggy panther back into consciousness. "Try not to let him throw up too soon," Tygra said, repositioning the X-ray machine so he could see the mass in his stomach as the solution interacted with it. He hoped it would dissolve it fairly fast. He predicted that the chemicals and oil would make Panthro’s already upset stomach react badly and that he’d be throwing it back up in no time. He really didn’t want to have to stomach tube Panthro and feed him the treatment more than once—he had been through enough as it was.

Panthro was still for a few moments, his breathing slightly labored while Cheetara and WilyKat continued to hold him in place. Tygra was pleased to see the chemical already interacting with the stone, and although it was very hard to see on the X-ray it looked as though it were spreading out on the screen, which probably meant that it was breaking apart. Then suddenly what Tygra expected happened and Panthro lurched forward, clutching his stomach and groaning.

"No, not yet!" Tygra said, almost shouting, before he caught himself and lowered his voice. "Panthro, try and keep it down…just a minute or two more. Please. It’s very important."

"I… I don’t…" Panthro swallowed and tightened his muscles, trying to resist the contractions. It only seemed to intensify the pain.

Cheetara slipped her arm around Panthro’s shoulders and hugged him. "It’s okay," she said softly. "This will be all over soon. Just hang in there."

"Auuugh… hurts…." Panthro groaned in agony, using every reserve of strength he could still call on in his weakened state to do as Tygra asked. The pain seemed to increase exponentially with every passing second, and the panther almost stopped breathing, knowing that the very act of releasing his diaphragm muscles would cause the inevitable.

Tygra looked at the screen. With all of Panthro’s erratic movements it was impossible to tell what, if anything, had broken up. "Just try a little bit longer if you can," he urged.

Panthro winced and grunted, grinding his jaw with the painful effort of stopping his body’s natural reaction. His stomach was twisting in pain, and the strain of past spasms and the general aches now all throughout his body only made it all the more brutal. Even he, the strongest of the Thundercats, couldn’t hold out any longer. "Tygra… can’t…" And with that he violently lurched forward and heaved. On the ball as always, Snarf managed to stick a bedpan under Panthro’s mouth before he could coat the X-ray machine in a spew of oily, gravelly emesis.

Once he started, the sick panther heaved several more times, each time bringing a thick mouthful of foul-colored vomit. It was fortunate in a way that he was already in great pain, for he didn’t really feel the added discomfort of the rocks scraping their way back up his esophagus. He bent over the pan, heaving for what felt to him like an endless eternity but was in reality only about two or three minutes, until nothing further came out with the spasms. When the contractions lessened enough for him to take a few gulps of air, Cheetara eased him back against the pillow.

WilyKat peered into the quite full bedpan and immediately winced. It was a thick sludge of oil, chemicals, and bile, with pebbles and stone all throughout it. "Yuck," was all he said, but it was quite an understatement.

Pumyra took a washcloth and wiped Panthro’s sweat-covered brow. "Do you feel any better?" she asked.

"I feel like I got run over by the Thundertank," Panthro replied weakly. "But my stomach doesn’t hurt so much right now."

Tygra reset the X-ray machine carefully over Panthro’s stomach. "Lie still if you can… I want to see if it made a difference." He ran the scan one more time. To his delighted surprise, the stomach was of all but a few tiny fragments of stone. "It worked," he told the others with a wide smile. "That boulder that was in his stomach is gone!"

"What about what was in his intestines?" Pumyra asked.

"That’s going to go next. Those pieces are a lot smaller." He glanced at the X-ray machine one more time, then at the bottle of his treatment formula. "Pumyra, you can set up an IV or something on Panthro so he regains the fluids he lost, right?" The puma nodded a yes, and Tygra poured some of the medicine into an empty glass on the nightstand. "All right then, do that, and in fifteen minutes add a liberal dose of oil to this and give it to him to drink. Maybe some bread too to settle his stomach. If he can keep that down so that he digests it enough to get it into his intestines it should take care of those remaining stones… and with any luck, he’ll be on the road to recovery. In the meantime, we’d better see to Lion-O. Hopefully we’ll have as much luck with him as we did with Panthro. Kittens, Cheetara, can you come with me?"

"Sure Tygra."

"No problem."

"Right behind you."

The four of them left the room while Pumyra set up an IV on him. She gently slid the needle into his arm, feeling guilty for causing him even that slight bit of pain after all that had just happened, and taped it on. "There you go," she said with a smile. "How’re you feeling now?"

Panthro smiled faintly. "Better." He shifted his head on the pillow and followed her with his eyes as she strode across the room to put a few things in order. "Pumyra," he said suddenly, "do you think this really will cure me and Lion-O?"

She turned and faced him. "I hope so, Panthro. I hope so."

After giving TugMug a similar examination with the scanner as he had Chilla, and finding similar results as far as the stones in the stomach and intestines, Alluro left TugMug’s quarters deep in troubled thought. He now knew what was at the root of their illness, but he hadn’t the slightest notion how he might cure it. There was no way to get the rock out of them without breaking it up or surgically removing it. The former he had no idea as to how he might accomplish, and the latter he wasn’t even going to think of trying. His skills with a blade were less than delicate, and he’d do far more harm than good if he were to try.

It also did not help that he was distracted… for as much as he tried to concentrate on solving the problem of the fossilized food, he was plagued by troublesome thoughts about Chilla’s other situation. The one involving her unborn, changed to stone, child. His child.

At least he was fairly sure it was his. While he and Chilla never discussed their relationship in much detail, he had a hard time imagining her being so close with any of the others. And now he had no idea what to think. The news that she expecting would have been shocking enough, and he was compelled to wonder why she never said anything. Surely she had to have known if she was as far along as it appeared. He wasn’t sure whether he felt relief, regret, or perhaps a bit of both, learning about it now when it was something that might never be.

Might? Alluro questioned inwardly. It’s stone, where’s there a "might" in that? He shook his head and continued walking. This sort of brooding wouldn’t get him anywhere.

He was so caught up in his thoughts that he nearly walked into Luna and Amok passing him in the hallway. "Watch it," Luna snapped impatiently, placing a second hand on the flask she held to steady it. When Alluro stopped short and stepped back, Luna looked him over. "You look like hell," she informed him bluntly.

Ordinarily he would have come back at her with some snide remark but this time he didn’t bother. Instead he looked at the container she held and frowned. "What is that?"

"I did a little research of my own while you were checking on TugMug, and prepared an herbal brew which should solve at least one of Chilla’s problems," she said as Amok opened the door to Chilla’s room and went in.

Alluro followed. "Solve how?" He glanced over at the ominously still form of the resting Chilla for a moment before returning his attention to Luna.

Luna opened the top of the flask, swirled it a bit, and sniffed at it for a moment. "This is a concoction of steeped Maka leaves and Firis ivy—Third Earth plants that have a similar chemical component to them as the root of the four-point Braechik plant found on the Third Moon of Plundarr." Alluro looked back at her blankly, so she continued to explain. "Braechik tea is mildly toxic. When enough of it is taken, it will cause muscular contractions… and in expectant females, can induce miscarriage."

Alluro blinked at her matter-of-fact tone in discussing such a matter. "What?" He then shook his head. "I’m not even going to ask why you know that."

"Back on the Moons of Plundarr it was very unseemly for nobles to conceive children in, shall we say, inappropriate circumstances. During my time growing up in the noble circle, I learned that more than a few noble women had used Braechik tea to discreetly take care of such problems," Luna explained.

Alluro looked at Chilla again, watching her chest rise and fall shallowly with labored breath as she slept. "I don’t want you to give her that."

Luna narrowed her eyes. She was getting tired of Alluro constantly questioning her actions. "It has to come out somehow," she replied with rising irritation. "And I don’t see you operating to remove it anytime soon, given how sick you looked just examining her earlier."

"She’s sick enough as it is, Luna," Alluro argued. "There’s no need to resort to such a drastic measure yet. There might be a way to—"

"What?" She noted the look on his face and shook her head in disbelief. "Don’t tell me you have some sentimental notion of trying to save it?" When he did not reply, she advanced toward him. "It’s stone, Alluro. Dead stone. If we don’t have it removed her body will eventually reject it on its own anyway… if she survives that long. What do you think all that blood was from anyway?"

"There’s a better way than that," he insisted stubbornly.

"Is there? Care to share it then?" she asked sarcastically. "Magic, perhaps? Why don’t you waste more time and go ask Mumm-Ra to cure her again?"

Alluro scowled and snatched the flask out of her hands. "Why don’t you?" he replied darkly. "Since you obviously have all the answers. Maybe your vast knowledge and sparkling personality will convince Mumm-Ra to save her where I failed to do so," he added, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

"Maybe I will," Luna retorted angrily. "Because I’ve sure as hell had it up to here with listening to you and your stubborn, stupidly sentimental, negative whining!" Her voice rose to a shrill screech on the last note. She gave Amok a not-so-gentle kick with the heel of her boot, and the two of them stormed out, leaving Alluro alone with the unconscious Chilla.

He sighed and sat in one of the chairs, setting Luna’s herbal "remedy" on the nightstand with countless other glasses, bottles, tissues, and other assorted items that had collected there in the course of Chilla’s illness. He studied her sleeping form and then noted the limited sun of DarkSide setting over the mountains. It’s been a long day, he mused silently. And it’s going to be an even longer night.