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THE MOST BEAUTIFUL TOE CLAWS YOU COULD EVER HOPE TO SEE

I won’t give you the gory details.

It’s hard for me to talk about even now.

I must be suffering from some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder from my recent horrorshow visit to Dean Floop’s lair. Because as I stand in the gym with Runcita right here in front of me, I can suddenly hear the Dean’s voice shouting in my skull: “Take my word for it, if you so much as even glance at my daughter Runcita I will have you marched out to the campus quad and I will blast you with a firestream and reduce your sorry tail to a pile of ash!” So let’s just say that Dean Floop’s threat is reverberating inside my skull and it’s definitely doing a bang-up job of psyching me the heck out.

Runcita is standing right here in front of me, waiting for me to speak.

“I I I I I I…”

But for the life of me I can’t make my black beak move and say what I want it to say. I look down and stare at Runcita’s scaly green webbed feet and see her toe claws with the bright red polish on them and oh my God are they ever luscious and mesmerizing. At that moment I feel like I would be happy if things could just stay like this forever and I could squat here studying her beautiful red toe claws. I would die a happy fiend.

Look at those gorgeous toe claws.

I want to weep with joy just looking at them.

I wonder if it’d be weird for me to get down and start kissing them with my beak?

Now on some level, everything seems so unreal. I can’t believe this is the same chick whose lair I infiltrated with a micro-drone. The chick I’ve spent the whole morning questing after.

Don’t be a wussy.

Gotta get a chick whose tail is thick.

I lift my gaze so I am staring into her eyes.

Runcita looks up at me with her big green eyes. “Yes? What is it, Weak Sauce?” And then she giggles. “I mean, Gork.”

My heart is pounding like a bastard.

“Um, Runcita,” I say. “I’ve been looking for you all morning. Because I wanted to ask you—”

And that’s when I black out.