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made her nice, too. She knew she wouldn't much care about his feelings in her natural state, but she was
glad to be the way he had made her. She felt so much better about herself this way, and not just because
of the way others saw her. She owed Nimby everything.
"Then so let it be," Jim said. Chlorine suspected that he, too, was beginning to enjoy this adventure,
which was surely quite different from his ordinary life in dread Mundania. "We shall drive to-" He
glanced at the note Nimby had given him. "Castle Roogna. We should be able to make it by morning."
Mary took his arm. "You have driven enough, dear," she said. "I will drive there, while you get some
necessary rest."
Karen stared at her. "Mom! You can drive the RV?"
"Stop teasing me, you little bleep," Mary said with a third of a smile. Unlike the others, she actually said
the word "bleep"; it wasn't a Conspiracy expurgation.
"But how will we find our way there, without Chlorine and Nimby to tell us?" David asked.
"Good point," Jim said.
Quieta had joined the group. "We really appreciate the way you helped us complete our task in time, at
the expense of your own freedom to leave Xanth," she said. "We have not known how to repay you, but
now perhaps we can. We shall provide a guide."
"But then that person won't be safe in the sanctuary cave," Mary protested.
"She will be safe at Castle Roogna, perhaps, especially if you succeed in saving Xanth. Here is my
daughter Trenita." A younger imp woman stepped forward. She looked to be in her mid-thirties.
"Then we are constrained to accept your kind offer," Jim said. "Now I think the madness is closing in;
you must close your cave, and we must be on our way."
So they bid a second parting to the imps, who Chlorine suspected were just as glad not to have to
entertain the family in the sanctuary cave, and went their ways. The Baldwin family piled into their
traveling house and moved off, Mary at the wheel, with Trenita Imp lifted into the seat next to Karen.
Chlorine and Nimby saw them off. It looked as if the vehicle were stretching and twisting like a giant
caterpillar, but she knew that was just the effect of the madness.
Then she turned to her companion. "So how do we find this windbreaker?" she asked.
He wrote a note: It is one of the possessions of Sending. We must obtain it from the ambitious program.
"Sending! The one we just messed up to rescue the Mundane pets? We're doomed."
Not if we approach him properly. Sending is rational.
"So how do we approach him?"
We must bring him a suitable gift, and answer his twenty questions.
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"Twenty questions? I may be smart, now, thanks to you, but I'm not sure I could answer that many
without a stumble. What happens if we miss one?"
We become two of Sending's artifacts.
"Nuh-uh, Nimby! I already have an assignment, and after that I'll have to go home and become dull
again. I can't get locked into slavery for some cold machine."
But I can answer the questions.
"Oh. If you're sure. How do we get there? It was a long fast ride in the Mundane moving house, and I
don't think we could walk that far tonight, even without the interference of the madness, not to mention
the wind." For the wind was rising again, blowing her skirt up and about, and trying to tangle her hair
enough to form a pack of snarls. Now that Sean wasn't here to goggle at her legs, she found this
inconvenient.
Nimby led the way to the side of the road. "But if we go beyond the enchanted limit, monsters can get
us," she said. But she knew Nimby was aware of that, and wouldn't lead her into danger.
There was a big puff of cotton caught in a tree. No, it was cloudstuff, she realized. Maybe some of the
cloud that made the Gap Chasm ferry had detached and drifted here. Naturally Nimby knew where it
was. So she helped him wrestle it out of the snags of the branches and twigs.
But the small cloud wanted to float; they couldn't get it down to the ground. Then Nimby boosted her up
onto it. She fell into its bowl-like surface, her legs in the air, her skirt halfway to her head.
Nimby climbed up on the other side, and rolled into the cloud bowl. He, too, landed mostly upside
down, but his trousers left him decorous.
"No fair," she said. "When I climbed in, I showed my panties to the sky. You didn't show anything. And
you probably saw my panties, too."
Nimby nodded.
"And you're not even embarrassed," she said severely. He nodded again.
"Or freaked out." Now she was annoyed. But then she realized that he was, after all, only a dragon, who
didn't see human beings as prospects for anything social. Why should he care about panties?
She got herself in order and poked her head over the edge of the cloud. It was still floating, and the wind
was blowing it north along the highway at increasing velocity. So they were being carried in the
direction they wanted to go. Obviously Nimby had known that this would be the case. The trollway was
bare, and the trees along the sides of it seemed to be shirting colors, textures, and natures, because of the
distortion by the intensifying madness. But they also channeled this gust of wind, so that the cloud was
floating straight along the channel, and still gaining speed.
"Well, if we're going to float there, let's get some shielding from the wind," she said. She took handfuls
of the cloudstuff at the rim and shaped it up into higher walls, and then all the way into a dome over
them. The material gleamed faintly, lighting the interior with a gentle yellow glow. It was fun to work
with cloud, because it was so soft and pliable. "Just the way a woman is supposed to be," she said as she
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finished the job. She didn't have quite enough material to make the dome complete, so she fashioned a
round window in the top, through which they could view the stars. Now they shared a spherical
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