I sought clarification. "Your elaborate metaphor is intended to signify..."

"We'll fill the bike room with pudding, man," he proclaimed, looking around the room with a light starting to grow in his eyes. "Imagine it, if you will. Picture it... in your mind's eye."

I'm afraid I froze. It took me a while to figure out which objection to lead with, and I lost valuable time. I'm his tactical better, but Rijn is occasionally a better demagogue than I am.

"Let your mind's eye run wild through the fields of your imagination with a bike room full of pudding. Just don't tell anyone."

I had to try something. "We'd need at least two hundred gallons of--"

"Chocolate pudding," Engel said.

"Well, of course, man, what the fuck," Rijn said, leaning back in his chair and swirling the wine in his glass just so.

I shot Engel a look of numb betrayal. I know when I'm beaten.

"I'll start tinkering," I said.

"Tinkering?" Rain was a bit too stoned to follow the conversation.

"Unless you have a good recipe for Two Hundred Gallons of Chocolate Pudding. Vegan, I assume." I banged on the wall. "Miranda!"

There was an interval full of muffled thumping. Engel yawned and put her head in my lap. "We will find chocolate tomorrow," she informed the ceiling.

Miranda stuck her head in the window. "Yeth?"

"I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to order us some cornstarch."

"I'm sending an order out tomorrow morning. How much do you want?"

"wWait," Rain said, as Rijn hissed and pinwheeled his arms and kicked her in the leg. "Why are we making two hundred gallons of vegan chocolate pudding?"

Miranda turned her lovely gaze upon me with the oiled grace of an antiaircraft gun. "Um," I said, withering under her gentle, patient regard. "Lots?"

SATURDAY EVENING

said the dancing melty monster on the poster in the kitchen, très Fear and Loathing in the Student Cooperative.

THERE WILL BE

(you could almost hear it pause for effect)

A HAPPENING.

And then, in smaller print, on a banner supported by cherubim,

IF YOU MUST COME CLOTHED, WEAR CLOTHING OF WHICH YOU ARE NOT FOND.

I must confess, the effect was striking.

I hacked savagely at the last box of cornstarch and emptied it into the small saucepan of boiling water. I watched, momentarily blissed-out, as a cloud of cornstarch swirled in the turbulent air over the boil and gradually cleared. I got a yogurt container and measured a cup and a half of sugar into the boil, frowned at it, added another half a cup. More stirring, more sugar. Some orange extract (why not?). I commended the rest of my stash of good dark chocolate (chopped fine) to the deepest of the deep, and began stirring rapidly.

"OH MY," said Miranda, walking a tour of little prelapsarian first-years up from the basement. "I WON-DER WHAT HE IS DO-ING." Anticipating the second half of this paragraph, I set a wooden spoonful of the stuff aside to cool, then continued cooking. The LPFY patrol clamored for enlightenment, but Miranda, who can be relied on, said nothing. Then she saw what I was doing and appeared at my elbow with a speed that bespoke dark sorcery. "Jeetje, do you really need to use that much vanilla? Do you have any idea how expensive--" I popped the Before spoon into her mouth and she subsided. I made meaningful eyebrows, then fed her an After spoon. "Fine," she hissed, vanishing in a cloud of freshmen.

I stirred a shot of bourbon into the evil brown mistake and cut the heat. As if on cue, Engel sailed in, home from the wars. She cast her bag to the floor, whipped off her sweater, tossed back a handful of raisins. "God's blood and bones, you're hot," I said.

"Mm. How's the pudding, Puddin'?"

"It's really more chocolate oobleck than pudding," I said. "And this is going to end in tears."

"You are a grumpy old man." I blew on the spoonful of whatever you like to call it, poured it into my hand, and splotched it on Engel's neck. She keened. I licked it off, then reflected. "More sugar, more vanilla, although your sweet coppery essence does wonders to balance the chocolate. How's the consistency?"

"Fool. You will pay."

I kissed her on the nose. "I know."

Rijn had dragged me from my desk to show me such progress as had been made on the pudding containment field. I suspect his attention span had given out, and he needed me to reinvigorate the process by watching him look at it.

We were walking through the kitchen on our way to the basement. "I'm coming around about this whole thing," I said, a bit louder than I needed to. "I think it's the atmosphere of secrecy." Miranda's freshman posse looked up all at once, like prairie dogs.

"I know, it's like a drug. You got the chocolate yet?" He whispered the second part, looking at the freshmen, enunciating the word "chocolate" to make it easier to read his lips.

"We're going tonight." We had, of course, started down the basement stairs by now. "You want to come?"

"Aw, no, I can't, man, I'm spending the whole night building a sweat lodge on the roof of Dwinelle."

"I see," I said. "I, ah, wonder if you've informed anybody else of this lodge. Like, say, the administration of Dwinelle."

"They'd never understand."

"So say we all." Then I saw the work in progress. "Good christ, Rijn, do you mean to beggar us?" Two hundred gallons may have been an underestimation. The man had built a containment wall that was the entire bike room, three or four foot deep.

"What's the matter, man?" Rijn gathered up his tools.

"Never mind, I just felt compelled to register some noise. This is actually really impressive. Carry on, my wayward son."

Rijn, without letting go of the hammer, swept the back of his right wrist across his forehead. The gesture was too cool not to have been calculated. "You're going to tell your children about this."

"No," I said. "I'm not."

"Wow," I said.

"Wow," said Engel.

We sat wrapped in sweaters and blankets, and fed each other chocolate in languid silence.

There was a knock at the door.

"Don't come in," Engel yelled at it. "He's cunnilinging me."

"He's what?" said Rijn, coming in. He looked at the bed, between us. "Oh, wow!"

Engel flopped back on the pillow. "Never mind."

Rain slipped around Rijn like a serpent, and saw the bed between us, and the floor. "Oh, wow," she drawled. "What did you guys do?"

Engel was still brooding. "Your stupid language. Why is there no gerund form of that?"

"Paaarty," said Meera, wandering in to investigate the fuss. She stopped dead. "Oh, wow."

"It's not even a verb," I pointed out.

"So," said Guam, walking in with his hand over his eyes. "I was told that you guys had scored impressively, and I wanted to get the full experience." He uncovered his eyes. "Oh," he said. "Wow."

"You're absolutely right!" Engel's mock-outrage seethed. "That's outrageous!"

Miranda was in the doorway, looking on in silent awe. "Wow," she mouthed at me.

"Congratulations," I said. "You've discovered article nine heptillion of the sexism of the english language."

"No wonder Rijn didn't understand me," said Engel, "your language is useless. What if you actually had been doing your job? We would be now a common spectacle." She lapsed into something that was either reflective or sulky. Then: "I should have said I was sodomizing you."

"That, the whole house would have come in to watch," said Rijn.

"Are you a participant in this conversation, suddenly?" I said, but it was lost in the general furor. I was beginning to feel like one of the camels in a crèche.

Some mysterious critical mass was reached."Yes, yes!" Engel yelled, perilously close to my ear. "Two hundred kilos of dark chocolate! Wonder of the age! Now get the fuck out of my room!"

"We love you all," I said, as the room gradually emptied. "I'd offer you a piece of chocolate, but there are Plans."

Alexis and Mrtyor followed me down the stairs, carrying the cauldron between them. I thunked the second biggest pot down on the second-to-last stair and pushed.

Brown. I thought, briefly, of the elevator in the Shining, and the Nickelodeon theme park, and that chocolate factory plant whose holding tank burst and flooded the downtown of wherever it was.

Alexis-Mrtyor-Cauldron and I did the world's most awkward do-si-do, and then the rest of Batch Seven was tipped into the pudding containment field. I dipsticked. We were up to one and three-quarters feet of pudding; another batch would probably suffice.

We trooped back up the stairs, thumping into the kitchen past the VERBOTEN sign on the basement door. Rijn has outdone himself. I almost couldn't bear to disobey the mostly-flensed head saying VERBOTEN myself, and I was the one who had commissioned the sign.

The pretense of secrecy was wearing thin. I was the eighth Angel, and I had broken the eighth Seal, and the name of that seal was Cornstarch.

The kitchen was uninhabitable. Some weird kind of vapor deposition was turning every surface white and unsettlingly-textured. The rendering cocoa fat was going up in the steam, which you only realized when you started breathing air that was not full of vaporous oil. The pile in the pot sink was beginning to strain classical mechanics. I had spilled the sugar onto the stove, and the acrid flare of burnt caramel rode over everything like a fat man who doesn't fit in the elevator with everybody but is determined to try.

Batch Eight (the fourth all-the-small-pots rotation) was close. The cornstarch mixture was thick enough, and the chocolate was almost melted in. Filling all the remaining metal containers in the house with water and putting them in the oven had been a good invention: the next batch's water was already up to temperature by the time the previous batch was rotated out to cool. I stepped out into the courtyard like the prince of everything.

Ah, but. Míra Miranda, comin' round the mountain with a last, wild look in her eye. She saw me, flung wide her arms, and grinned. "Surprise kitchen inspection!"

We turned as one and looked at the kitchen. I blinked.

I rummaged in my bag, and found a bottle of last fall's applejack, which I handed her. She communed meaningfully with it, then passed it back that I might do likewise. We clasped hands, each pretended to spit over the other's left shoulder (you're supposed to actually spit, but we were in the kitchen), swore desperate oaths, then began.

Miranda managed to acquire her freshmen and dragoon them into service almost immediately (I think she has enchanted them as familiars, and can summon them by her magic). I organized them in a line running through the kitchen and down the stairs to the bike room, and established the cleverest of them as a floater. Then I joined Miranda in a whirlwind scrubdown of the worst surfaces in the room, under her command. Miranda's triage was not immediately transparent to me, but I put my faith where it was due.

The posse had every vessel of protopudding brigaded down the stairs within ninety seconds. I stationed one of them as a lookout to watch for the coming of the inspector, and got the clever one to stupid-check the house. Miranda started doing that thing which would count as barking orders if anyone else had done it, and the scrubbing continued. I chivvied unused ingredients into their proper places, then went down to the basement and hid all the chocolate-slunked pots under the near edge of the pool as best I could. It felt a bit like hiding under the bed when Mom is coming. At all costs, the inspector had to be prevented from seeing the basement. I plugged in the lavender-filtered lights ringing the bike room, then went back upstairs.

The clever one, all fidgets and uncertainty, reported back that she had hidden the living-room bong, but there was really no disguising the essential nature of the house. I told her that we had managed to not get closed down until now, despite that nature, and gave her the last of the chocolate.

We were done. I stared at everything for about thirty seconds, and then the lookout hooted like an owl.

Given the obvious and unfolding delicacy of our situation, I will let the last sentence in this paragraph explain why Miranda is a brass-ovaried force of nature, and not to be trifled with: She sent her last freshman to run the houses and announce the beginning of the party.

I goggled at her. She shrugged. I nodded at her, she nodded at me, I nodded at her, she nodded at me, I nodded at her, we squared our shoulders and stationed ourselves athwart the door to the basement. Miranda collared Emilliesse, who had just come in and started making an omelette, and who didn't seem to know that anything curious was happening.

"Em, sorry, would you go stand in the basement and make sure nobody comes up the stairs?"

"What--"

"Go! And contain the whooping!" (that was me; Miranda would have spent another five minutes apologizing for the inconvenience). Em went.

"So, uh," I said. There was not yet an inspector in evidence. "Where's--"

"Surprise! Kitchen inspection!" said the kitchen inspector, as she was carried in on a sedan chair borne by eunuchs (not really).

I leaned towards Miranda, trying not to look conspiratorial: "How did you know we were going to--" But Miranda was already at the inspector's elbow, eyes wide as saucers, collecting light with her hair to frame her face in innocence.

So there matters stood for the next quarter of an hour. Miranda squired the inspector around the kitchen, preventing the inspection of particularly heinous regions by some kind of subtle magnetism. I managed (in-pocket touch-typed text messages, subtle frantic gestures) to reroute a steady stream of naked hippies away from the kitchen before the inspector noticed them.

"Do you think we passed?" I muttered, at the back of the inspector's receding head.

"Well, she wasn't calling the cops..." said Miranda, taking down the VERBOTEN sign (which I had apparently left up all through the inspection, with a big old chocolate thumbprint in one corner, oops).

"Now what do we do?"

Miranda opened the basement door with one hand, starting to take off her belt with the other. I followed her down.

The tableau which greeted me has been left as an exercise for the imagination of the reader.

Everyone was there, looking up at me with a kind of weird, tense expectancy. Almost everyone. I sought my girlfriend in vain. "Wait, where's--"

"REVENGE," Engel said, tsunami-bombing me headlong into the mire. As everybody surged about trying to stay out of the way, Engel actually seized me by the hair of my head and plunged me in. This was disorienting, so it took a moment for me to get an elbow hooked around her taut, supple thigh and put my weight under her. She wrapped her arms around me as she fell, trying for a sacrifice throw; I demonstrated the folly of this in the current circumstances by submerging her in pudding. She flailed about, then got hold of Erik Sorenson's leg and climbed him like a tree, which got him into the game.

I think he thought that the whole thing was a plot against him, and he raised his ham-like fists against us both. I thought all lost. For reasons unclear to me, though, Miranda chose that moment to fall on him like a terrible whirlwind. I weighed my options, and threw a generous fistful of pudding at Rijn's head.

Pandaemonium ensued. Mrtyor claims I bit him on the leg, but this seems unlikely, as my primary concern was not getting drowned by Engel. I do remember looking left and seeing Miranda ride Erik Sorenson in a sort of cavalry charge against Alexis, who had been standing in the corner and sowing the bones of anyone who came near him with ruin. I did not see how they fared (I got Engel by the hair and had to take advantage of the situation), but Erik Sorenson got a nasty sprained ankle at some point in the proceedings. Rain actually seems to have fought nobly, as a sort of afterthought to her quest for understanding: she would ask someone what was going on, they would attempt to throw her down or rub pudding in her dreadlocks, she would drub them and go off to find someone else.

Alexis had been shouting tactical advice at me, which I couldn't really hear over the din. At one point it occurred to me that his voice had recently shifted in pitch and gained some urgency. But things had just started to go well for me, so I decided that he would make more of an effort to communicate sensibly if it was important, and finally managed to pin Engel to the wall. I was trying to decide whether to kiss her or put pudding in her ear when I started wondering what had produced that sharp, liquid crack.

Convinced that I had just paralyzed someone I was in love with, I sort of staggered backwards into Mrtyor. He, having turned to investigate the awful smell, caught me. Engel, who was fine, extracted herself from the divot she'd broken through the retaining wall. As the smoke percolated through the room, everybody started to calm down and ask searching questions. The level of the pond was down to about a foot and a half and seemed to be falling.

"Oh," said Rain. "I get it. We've flooded our furnace with chocolate pudding."