Hello, my Sparkles! Here are three things you learn on Frostburn when you’re locked out of your room for seven hours:

• The fourth hygroni starts to taste like toothpaste;
• Janz knows more dirty jokes than a Zorphesian stevedore;
• Jot Rustin can dance!—too bad his breath smells like onion rings.

That’s right. Your loyal tea-spiller’s key card would not beep—it only booped! Such was the story up and down Hotel Row and fed-up pillow-fluffers blamed Lubabub’s hothouse flower, Aloe, who steamed up her sweet suite until the electrical circuits popped! With doors on the fritz, no one could hit the rack, so they hit the nightclub instead!

One dashing denizen absent from the fun was Locke. He’d already turned in, with shades shut tight and a jar of astro-pickle juice close to hand.You’ve surely seen the embarrassing MPEGs of our Chronian champion stumbling through the lobby, looking as drunk as a Centaurian brakeman on St. Ethyl’s Day. Not a great look, Locke!

But stay your judgey hands, my Sparkles! Because the Chronian medical staff are certain Locke was rocked not by drink, but by fink! Pie-sized pupils and raving rants about extended keytar solos tipped off the mindful medicos that Locke had been SpordSpiked! That dirty mushroom—whose funky bunco cheated Locke out of victory his last time in the ring—hasn’t given up his wicked ways!

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Now, Sparkles.

I’m not saying this had anything to do with what came next. And by next I mean the Lubabub practice session that descended into a foul Frostburn fiasco. Far be it from this tittle-tattler to imply that a humiliated Locke, hellbent on revenge for Spord’s trippy tipple, broke strict Chronian protocols and ordered his good boy Wotchy to deploy the top-secret Barf Bark™.

All I am saying is that Frostburn Asteroid was a warm and sunny beach destination last time it saw this much vomit!

I hear that any Lubabubian player that came within one leash-length of Wotchy stopped, teetered, and then purged themselves onto the diamond-plate floor! Just picture it: Gorrit gacking! Spord spewing!! Lumph losing his lumphch!

(Pity the poor, pongy grounds crew.They weren’t done mopping till the second moonrose over Carbon Butte.) I dunno—maybe it was just coinkydink!

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If so, it’s another coinkydink (a co-coinkydink?) that King Valla learned about the hijinks within the hour! He summoned Locke for an angry dressing down via holo-call, because the prudent potentate has long been a jealous guard of Chronian tech. Tipping our hand on Barf Bark before match play is precisely the sort of blunder he abhors.

Still, I wonder: who told him?

The entire Bespoke Moon thinks so highly of Locke they’d rather eat transistors than raise a word against him... except one. Could Crown Prince Boone have dropped the dime on the man he sees as a dime-store pretender?

Who knows?! Not me! I’m just a gal with sore feet who hopes her key card finally goes beep!

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