Lost & Found - Part 4
By Amber Turner

Sherry cautiously inched her way across the throne room beneath the unwavering stare of the Queen’s Elite Guard. With the sheer amount of dust and debris in the air it was no wonder they wore masks to protect their airways. Unfortunately such common sense seemed to hold little weight among the castle staff. I don’t care what anyone says. Those masks don’t look like beards. Or fangs. This room, however, IS a horrid mess. Sherry’s whiskers twitched with amusement. Trust a human to make a mess of a mouse hole.

Queen Dawn had wasted little time after hearing Sherry’s news. Frankly,  Sherry saw it as a sign of Dawn’s queenly experience that she had waited at all before initiating her own personal excavation. Dawn as commander would have simply walked in and knocked down the entire wall. Dawn as Queen however had managed to sit still long enough to pay lip service to magic centric pontifications of the wise. Good thing she didn’t wait too long. The longer we leave it back here the more likely it is the tail-wrenching thing will go missing. Of course now we have a whole different nest of problems.
The immediate results of Queen Dawn’s brief foray into demolition were fast becoming a public relations nightmare.  Audiences had been suspended until the artifact could be retrieved and the throne room cleared of rubble. The mere presence of the Queen’s Elite Guards were causing a stir and nothing the Queen, her counselors nor Sherry herself could say seemed potent enough to stop the whispered conjectures of just what exactly was going on. Not that anyone particularly wanted to trumpet news of the discovery from the castle battlements until the crystal had been successfully retrieved, but, in Sherry’s opinion at least, the confusion was doing more damage than if they had employed that trumpeter in the first place.

On top of it all someone had apparently gotten in to see Ricardo and was now spreading tales about his knowledge of the whole process.  As if anyone can trust a thing that comes out of his mouth. Solitary confinement isn’t fit for man or mouse. Thankfully that breach of security was one problem that would not occur a second time. Queen Dawn’s blistering lecture on proper protocol and procedure had seen to that. Looking up at the chest-sized hole in the northern wall, Sherry smiled. The hole wasn’t really that bad of work for a first timer. A little rough around the edges but not bad. Not bad at all. Now we just have to get the blasted thing out.