After the oracle left they finished off the pizzas and discussed sleeping arrangements. Anne was going to spend the night and while there was a third bedroom there was no bed in it, so it was decided that Anne would take Robert's room and Robert would sleep in the living room on the pull-out couch. Anne decided to stay in the hope that she would have an opportunity later to talk with Robert alone about all of these strange events and the possible danger that he was in. She cleaned up the dining table with Jessie and after the two of them did the dishes while in the living room Robert was putting linen on the couch. Jessie was tired and went upstairs as soon as they were done with the dishes, giving Anne the opportunity that she wanted to speak with Robert alone, not knowing that Jessie had received instructions from the goose to leave them alone as soon as was possible. She joined the goose, the goat and the wolf atop the stairs where they were planning on spying on Robert and Anne from to see if they reconciled immediately.

As he did every night before he went to bed Robert turned on the news to look for any news stories that might give them some clues as to the movements of the guardians. The lead story that night, as it was every night, was about the continued extraordinary success of Jim Balmer's campaign despite the off-putting rhetoric that was increasingly coming from the campaign. The controversial story today was about one of Jim Balmer's campaign aides who earlier had said that the abolition of slavery was something that perhaps needed to be reassessed given that Jim Balmer's stated aim was to firmly establish the United States as a Christian nation and there were many passages in the Bible that not only endorsed but encouraged slavery. The extraordinary thing about the story was that the aide had not been fired and the campaign had not issued an apology and yet Jim Balmer's poll numbers had not suffered in the slightest. Jim Balmer's inevitability as the next president of the US was being increasingly accepted by the country's population and the national discourse had shifted to a discussion about what a Balmer presidency meant for the American people, in particular the rights of women, people of color and homosexuals. To many Jim Balmer represented fear of a descent into a Handmaid's Tale like Christian authoritarianism, while the best that the Democrats could offer was to tell people not to believe Jim Balmer's lie about the massive crop infection being an act of divine retribution and to trust that the brilliant minds that the US had to call upon would identify the problem and fix it. The leading candidate in the Democratic primary was Wisconsin senator David Groff, who, in a head to head general election match-up with Jim Balmer, trailed him by eighteen points. Senator Groff was, by most measures, a fantastic candidate. He was good looking, articulate, well educated and had a long list of bipartisan legislative accomplishments from his time in both state and federal government. If he was running in any other election cycle against a candidate like Jim Balmer then he would have been the overwhelming favorite for the White House, but these were political circumstances unlike any other, and Robert had to admit that the tapestry of events weaved by the raven was nothing short of sheer genius.

"The Raven's helping him?" Anne asked Robert when she entered the living room and saw Jim Balmer on the TV screen.

"Yeah; the election's seven months away, I don't know how we're going to stop this."

"The goose said that the rat is responsible for the farm failures; what is the rat?"

"The rat is an agent of chaos, it delights in needless strife and bloodshed, which is what they're hoping to produce with all of this."

"Why? What is the point of all of this?"

"According to the goose their goal is to tear everything down so that it can be rebuilt according to their ideals, which are very severe and exclusionary."

"I still don't understand what the goose's plan is exactly for stopping them."

"I don't know what it is either, the goose keeps telling me to trust that it does have a plan that will come together when the time is right."

"And what is your role in all of this? Why did the goose pick you?"

"As far as I can tell my only job is to hold out the egg for these animals to touch it and be awakened, my role in all of this is nothing like Jim Balmer or Fyodor Milichenko's."

"This is all so crazy."

"I know, I thought when I started shitting those golden eggs that I'd hit the jackpot, I didn't know that it meant I was going to be pulled into all of this."

"Aren't you scared? I mean, you're having to go up against all of these powerful forces and you're just...you."

"I'm not scared, it frustrates me how much the goose keeps me in the dark but I trust it, that hasn't changed and I don't think it ever will."

The answer that Robert gave was exactly the answer that Anne would have expected him to give. Although it had caused some problems for him in the past, he was still loyal to a fault and if asked for help he would do all that he could for you without for a moment feeling as if an imposition had been placed upon him, that had been the case when her father was sick and Robert agreed to move him in with them and paid for a nurse to take care of him. Spending this time with him, more time than she normally spent when she checked in on him, Anne was being reminded of all of the qualities that Robert possessed that made her love him so much. She could no longer deny that she wanted to be with him and the moment was perfect for her to let him know that, which she would have done if someone hadn't rung the doorbell just then. The goose knew the second it heard the doorbell that there was trouble. It descended the first flight of stairs and watched on from the landing as Robert went to the door and answered.

"Hi, I'm looking for Robert."

It was a beautiful and sexy young Hispanic woman, who the goose instantly realized wasn't what she appeared.