The Incident with the Cake

This was all long before Snowzie was even a fuzzy little baby cutie snuggly furpuppy. As it happened, all seven members of the McTweak Agency had been wearily expressing the shared hope for some well-deserved time in the Fantasy Suite, and they might have had it too—had it not been for Fatty. What can we say? He loves you like a fat kid loves cake. It's a blessing and a curse.

As suspicious as Fatty was of strange cake—FattyMcTweak being infamously picky about cakes, especially chocolate cake—it was a reliable bet that Fatty couldn't walk away without giving the strange cake some measure of attention. Well, y'know, he couldn't walk much at all, 'cause, y'know, he's really, really fat and all—but that's not the point of the cake story, so leave it alone already.

What started as a totally innocent, quick, harmless, nothing-at-all 5% glance... somehow stunned Fatty into frozen, jaw-hanging-open rapture. (Not totally unusual for Fatty when there's cake around.) Garbage instantly suspected cake.

By the time Cody noticed the elkhounds were no longer in the lead, Fatty's casual glance had metastasized into a full-blown 110% eyeball assault. The curves on that cake!! The frosting!! That cake… that cake wasn't… that couldn't be a homemade cake, could it?? Was there, like, fruit in the middle? He wondered.

At that time, there were actually two elkhounds, neither of whom seemed to weigh very seriously any admonishment that chocolate cake was supposedly poison for dogs. The bigger dog, Guinness (Peace Be Upon Him), actually seemed to take such warnings as a challenge to his titanium indestructibility. Any mention of caution about anything at all was likely to have him charging headfirst into a truck on the freeway at 65 miles per hour, after launching off of a 14-foot moving trailer also doing 65, pretty much just as a hard flex.

So it was best not to mention cake, or mushrooms, or grapes, or plastic chess pieces, or families of brown bears, or pretty much anything to Guinness that a normal elkhound might find problematic—unless you wanna see the guy hang himself by his own leash just to watch you squirm!

And the girl elkhound was worse! Windy the Wild! Faster than the wind, especially when there's human food that might kill a dog involved. You can't even get a cake baked if she's in the kitchen. All I'm saying is, the wrapper is no obstacle if a stick of butter is anywhere softening on a counter. (We're not gonna talk about the butter either. Add it to the list of stuff we don't mention around the elkhounds.)

But cake?? A fully baked, finished, and frosted chocolate cake? Now that's something to woof home about any day of the week—and that's just Fatty. The dogs were positively drooling. At this point, FattyMcTweak was far from alone in attending to this delicious diversion. Cody was ceaselessly chattering away to Ashley about how it would be fair to divide the cake and about what he'd like to do with a slice or two.

All progress was hopelessly derailed. The dogs were a frothing puddle of fur and drool tugging hard at the leashes attached to the aching arms of Ally and Ashley, and Trashy was frantically hollering something about the potential danger of fruit in the center of the cake! Even worse, promises of cake were beginning to circulate among onlookers, and a crowd was gathering.

The Elkhounds, normally the McTweak Agency source of sanity and guidance in the matrix world of zombie troglodyte NPCs (non-puppy creatures), were by now apoplectic in their attention to the cake, and involuntarily furring the whole place up like a pair of startled squids spewing ink— totally oblivious to the mess their fur was causing. Understanding the danger, after triple-checking that there were really no other options, Garbage delicately turned to Ashley, and inquired if she might help. Garbage had some small hope that maybe Ashley had eaten recently. Or maybe had a nap.

There had been no nap. Not for a very long time. And it's seriously doubtful a snack would've helped the situation much. Ashley was still in law school, VERY pregnant at the time, so cake had recently become among her very top priorities. That and pickles. Her dress had been crooked and inside out all day, and nobody was gonna tell her—the mood swings being wiser to avoid than tempt encountering. To behold a typically composed AshleyMcTweak raging about parking spaces and mayonnaise had been funny at first, but those days were a distant memory. This whole cake fiasco had better work out, or there was likely to be hell to pay.

It was okay, though; FattyMcTweak always had pickles just in case. Fatty, for his part, had always been suspicious about promises of cake for as long as anyone could remember, and nobody could ever get him to talk about it. He'd learned from hard experience not to get his hopes up about cake. Some cakes look pretty good on the outside, and then they have, like, fruit in the middle, or worse, NUTS. Actual nuts. In cake. I know, it's wild!! Perfectly good cake, for God's sake, what are the humans even thinking?? Just send the flood already.

Fatty was ranting at Garbage as usual, but Garbage didn't seem to care about the cake at all! Garbage was walking briskly ahead, unspeaking, evidently engaged in solving some mystery nobody else on the team had perceived. Apart from avoiding pregnancy rage, the only thing that did seem to draw a wrinkled brow of concern from Garbage was the all-too-familiar dread of what Grumpy would do if, in fact, there was no cake in the end. Grumpy had already pulled out the "work-you-over-with-a-stick" Sheng Long-style walking cane from Street Fighter II, and he was poking at Trashy in hopes of further instigating. It didn't even really seem to anybody that Grumpy needed a walking stick, but he sure seemed to like having a poking stick!

Grumpy, it also seemed, was unnervingly determined to keep reminding Ashley every five minutes that promises of cake had been made under a legally enforceable and contractually binding handshake agreement—or, hopefully, Garbage had written something down—and that also, she looked awfully young to be a lawyer. And that Trashy really should have more to say about how they had all come to find themselves in this entire cake predicament to begin with!

AllyMcTweak, who up to this point had been dismissively alluding to rumors about low-quality cake flooding the market everywhere, and how people just didn't appreciate a high-quality slice of cake anymore these days, agreed that Ashley seemed too young for all of this and tried to comfort her perky pal with commiserating stories of her own teenage pregnancies. Trashy agreed, snatching Grumpy's cane and pointing disapprovingly toward a tabloid magazine with a cover about "20 Teen Moms in Malibu" while shaking his head in slow-motion regret.

"Well," began Trashy, "at least you're not a—" Ashley had snapped, louder than Ally was prepared for—which was far enough out of character even by pregtarded standards that everyone stopped to look at her face. Nobody was thinking about cake at that moment. Except Fatty, of course.

Cody was trying to break the tension.

And it was just then, as awkward silence mixed with dreams of sweet, sweet cake (lightly dusted in just the right amount of elkhound fur) lingered among the assembled McTweak agents, that GarbageMcTweak declared in a tone of confidence-deflating trepidation: