Night 1
Skipper faced away from Rico and Private. Wings clasped behind his back, he wanted the dramatic flare when he began the morning's briefing. When the time felt right to him (actually, he heard Private beginning to fidget and didn't want to lose his captive audience), he spun around abruptly.
"Kowalski: progress report!" he barked.
But Kowalski was nowhere to be seen.
Skipper scratched his chin contemplatively. Kowalski was never late. The morning briefing was always at 21:00 hours, because that's unpredictable and your enemies will never see it coming when you call it the morning briefing. He smirked thinking of how clever he was.
Suddenly, Kowalski exploded out of the tunnel the 4 of them had carefully crafted. He was agitated, frantic even, and so out of breath that it was hard to get any sense of what he was saying.
"They - someone - it - bad!! - I went - look - GONE" he gasped, panting. "I tried - hacking - couldn't see - something's WRONG!"
Being the ever supportive, calm, and uplifting leader, Skipper slapped Kowalski across the face as only a penguin can do.
"KOWALSKI. Pull yourself together. Now. What did you see?"
The red mark on Kowalski's face from the slap helped to bring him back to reality. As his world came back into focus, he found himself staring into the slightly askew eyes of Private. The startle was so great that he fully snapped back to reality.
Skipper slapped Kowalski one more time for good measure. "Now what are you talking about - what is this screen saying "access denied" about?"
"I continued the search for Manfredi and Johnson as planned. I rigged up a system for keeping an eye on the others from Central Park and I tried to log into it to see if I saw anything
suspicious going on when it was dark."
Rico looked up from his sushi preparation. He didn't say much, but he listened to all, and he marveled to himself at how Kowalski could design a working electronic system when they were on an island in the middle of nowhere with no people to be
stolen from seen.
"The system appeared to be offline and I chalked it up to an unscheduled patch, so I went out to investigate. Everyone was sleeping or otherwise accounted for, except one. I couldn't find Gloria anywhere. I checked all of her usual spots and there was no trace of her until I got to the cabana."
He paused, taking a shaky breath before snapping back to attention.
"Then - blood, everywhere. The sand was all churned up, there had obviously been a struggle, but I couldn't make out any footprints of the assailant."
He solemnly held up a horrifying calling card, a single, LARGE, tusk-like tooth.
"This was left on her drink coaster."
The penguins were deeply shaken. If someone as strong and tough as Gloria could vanish overnight and have a tooth left as a message, that boded very poorly for Manfredi and Johnson. And what of the other animals from Central Park? Were they safe? Were the penguins safe??
Only time would tell.
Dead is...
