"Evening!" remarked Tank cheerily, pulling his large frame out of the darkness.
"Have you been chasing parked cars again?" mocked Peter.
Tank offered up a sarcastic grin in return as he dodged past the piano and into the living room. Suddenly, another head popped out of the darkness.
"Hi guys," called Flash, bounding out of the hole, hot on Tank's heels, just as the Galileo thermometer shot back into the upright position and the piano began to swing back into place.
"FLASH!" they both exclaimed. "How are you?"
"Fine thanks, and looking forward to playing... what did you call it again... Monogomy?"
"Monopoly!" asserted both friends simultaneously, their faces creased with laughter.
"Oops... oh yeah... Monopoly. Anyhow, thanks once again for the invite and sorry that I can't return the favour at the moment. With everything that's going on, the king is busier than ever and I don't think, even if I begged, that I could bring the two of you back... sorry!"
"It's okay," replied Tank, before Peter even had a chance to open his mouth. "We know the situation and it's not a problem for us to take turns in hosting. Anyhow, you have to travel all this way, and we just have to sit in our houses... easy really. So don't mention it again, it's a pleasure to have you come along. Besides, having you here stops me killing Peter when all he goes on about is being clean and tidy. 'Don't put your drink down there... not without a coaster! Use a serviette if you're going to eat one of those! Take care with the ketchup bottle... you don't want to spill any on the carpet!' If I was here on my own with him... I might just end up giving him a head transplant. I often think of ripping it off and mounting it on top of the hoover that's always on standby over there in the corner."
Flash smiled at Tank's little monologue, glancing across at the vacuum cleaner that was indeed standing ready to go in the corner of the room. By now, Peter was blushing profusely at Tank's full-on rant.
"It lives in the corner all the time. I've got nowhere else to put it."
"Don't give me that dragon dung," replied Tank smiling. "I know it doesn't live there. And if it did, it most certainly wouldn't be plugged in, with the socket switched on. I know you're a stickler for things like that, Peter, and you'd never let it stay plugged in overnight... so there!"
"Alright, alright," conceded Peter, holding his hands up. "Let's just get on with... Monogomy... shall we?"
Now it was Tank and Flash's turn to crease up with laughter.
"You know what I mean," stated Peter, sitting down next to the neatly stacked piles of pretend money on the floor.
"Ahhh... so you're the banker are you?" observed Flash, taking in the game board, the trays of food and drink, as well as all the fake money.
"How appropriate," chuckled Tank, "I've always thought of you as a banker."
Smiling and shaking his head, Flash tried very hard not to laugh as Peter motioned for the two of them to sit, and started giving out the designated piles of money that he'd already counted out. As he did, the doorbell rang. For just a split second the three of them became alert, tense.
"It's alright," declared Peter. "It'll just be someone trying to change my electricity supplier. I'll get rid of them... back in a mo."
Wandering down the hallway, Peter wondered if Tank and Flash were behaving themselves with the bank's money. So caught up in the moment, he'd already turned the lock and started to open the door before realising that he should at least have looked to see who was on the other side of it. If he had, he might not have had quite the surprised expression he was now wearing. After a brief, uncomfortable silence, Peter said,
"Hi Rich. How you doing?"
"Good thanks," replied Richie. "Can I come in?"
The first thing that zipped through his mind was,
'Boy, this has the potential to go badly wrong,' but the word that came out of his mouth was,
"Sure." Before he could mention that Tank and Flash were there, Richie had flitted past him and shot through the door into the living room. Securely shutting the front door, he quickly caught up with Richie, just as she'd discovered Tank and Flash. Richie raised an eyebrow at the sight of the Monopoly set.
"I didn't realise you had visitors! I'll come back some other time," she said, turning on her heels.
Bravely, or stupidly, depending on how you looked at it, Peter grabbed her by the elbow, stopping her progress back down the hallway. Instantly he regretted it and let her go.
"Don't go Rich. Stay... please?"
"Please Richie," echoed Tank's voice from the living room floor. "We'd really like that. Besides, it would give us a chance to kick your ass at Monopoly, or Monogamy as these two muppets like it to be known."
Peter knew exactly what Tank was doing. Under normal circumstances there was no way Richie would let a challenge like that go unheeded, and would undoubtedly make everyone pay by wiping the floor with them at the game.
'But if I know, then so does she,' thought Peter, as the awkward silence ensued.
Richie gave Peter her... 'look.' He'd seen the 'look' a thousand times and although he didn't know whether things would go badly or not, he was certain that the evening wasn't going to be dull, at the very least.
Strolling back into the living room, Richie sat back down next to the pile of money that was the bank. Peter's mouth opened just a fraction to tell her he was sitting there, when his brain caught up with events and immediately shut it. His brain screamed...
'If she wants to sit there... LET HER!' Walking around to the other side of the board, Peter plonked himself down in between Flash and Tank, as far away from the food and drink as possible.
Richie extended her hand in Flash's direction.
"I don't believe we've been introduced?"
Flash reached out with his perfectly formed hands, which encompassed all of Richie's slender little fingers.
"Dendrik Ridge, but you can call me Flash. It's a pleasure to meet you."
Richie's head creased in puzzlement.
"Flash, you say." She looked at Peter and Tank with an odd expression on her face, as her dragon senses stretched out to the max. Tank was the first to catch on.
"It's okay Rich, he is the Flash that we told you about, and yes, he's definitely one of us. It's just since his 'Antarctic adventure', he's very difficult to sense. Whenever I try and check him out, he comes across as more human than dragon... sometimes it's the other way round. It does seem to change."
As Richie cottoned on, Flash arched his head towards Tank.
"Does it really differ that much?"
Tank nodded.
"Seems to. From my limited experience, you seem to appear more human the later the hour. In the daytime you feel... well not fully dragon... but I can tell you're not human. The later in the day it gets, the more difficult I find it to sense that you're not entirely human... SORRY!"
"Don't be sorry," replied Flash. "If nothing else it's an interesting perspective on what's happened to me that I don't know about. Maybe one day it'll come in handy and I can use it to my advantage."
"Well," continued Richie, "it's a pleasure to meet you. I've heard a lot about you. You sound like my kind of dragon."
Flash bowed his head in acknowledgement.
"I've heard all about you, and it has to be said that by the sound of things, you make everything I've ever done seem quite tame... so it's a pleasure to meet you, finally."