“I have a legitimate point!” Frank pounded his fist onto his desk.

Magdalene snorted. “Bless your heart.”

“Remind me, Frank,” Tyrone Brightwell said. “Who made you king? I didn’t vote for you.”

“Ahahaha!” Aiyo cracked up. “I see what you did there!”

I looked at Tony, who had shifted back into his regular clothes. He nodded. We quietly switched places, and I hurried through the inn to the oomboles. I’d had it up to my ears with the Innkeeper Assembly and its branches.

We had modeled the oombole section after massive observation aquariums. The walls of their connected tanks were transparent, and the tanks themselves stretched fifty feet high. Walking between them was like strolling on the bottom of the sea.

The entire oombole delegation swam in a school inside the largest tank, the size of an Olympic swimming pool. I found Sean on the side by one of the smaller tanks connected to the larger one by a narrow channel. He was watching Oond. The spousal candidate was making tight counterclockwise circles.

Uh-oh.

I approached the transparent wall. Oond ignored me.

“How long has he been like this?” I murmured.

“Forty-five minutes,” Sean answered. “He keeps circling, secreting stress pheromones, and urinating.”

Everything about this was bad. The oomboles were not solitary. They didn’t go off by themselves, and they didn’t swim in small circles. They were foragers, which was why we had to make a giant tank for them. Oond was in acute distress. A guest in our inn was having a nervous breakdown. My parents would be aghast. I had shamed the family.

“Why is he swimming in his own piss?” Sean asked.

The oomboles were extremely fussy about their bathroom habits. We had had to redo their latrine area three times just to make sure it was aesthetically pleasing and private enough.

“It makes him feel safer. It’s his equivalent of curling into a fetal ball. Have you gotten him to respond at all?”

“No.”

I sealed off the small pool. “Let’s try a lower temperature and soothing light.”

Gertrude Hunt’s massive temperature-regulating pumps came online, sending cool water into the tank. I dimmed the lights. The water plants inside the tank fluoresced gently.

“Let’s wait,” I said. “Have you had breakfast?”

“No.”

I reached into the pocket of my robe, pulled out a cookie in a plastic bag, which I had stolen from the kitchen earlier, and passed it to him. He wolfed it down.

Oond kept swimming.