Tzich only smiled at her with crooked satisfaction until the gurney was wheeled out through double doors and Carly along with it. [i]Hunger[/i] was the word she'd been looking for. He got the jitters just thinking about those stories he'd heard of the devil's daughter: how her ruthlessness was unmatched, her strength was insurmountable, and her will alone was enough to make the Titans quake in their cells.

She was going to make a beautiful fiend.

Paperwork on a clipboard was shoved into his hands, and a trail of concerned questions received answers like "Jane Fonda" and "crazy bitch with an axe." Eventually the nurses decided it best to point out the signature line, to which Tzich applied a grandiose scriggle before the clipboard was rudely taken away. So he amused himself instead by peeling pages out of the magazines and folding airplanes and hats out of them. He found a pen and wrote a few lines of a Tennyson poem on the wall before a nurse took it away from him. When asked to sit down he sat on the floor and stared at a woman across the room who was sobbing like she had a stomachful of toads. He would have gone to comfort her (really he would) except he couldn't be bothered, and where had they taken Gimpy?

She was in surgery, he was told -- but they didn't tell him [i]where[/i] surgery was, only that it was past the locked door that only the nurses could get through. Tzich begged a stick of gum off the receptionist, and he chewed and eyed the policemen that gawdled about the front desk. It'd be no use to get himself arrested. He supposed he could go deposit this demon into its proper place, but he couldn't afford to lose track of Carly.

So he sat, and he watched the sobbing toad-lady, and he waited.