“Professor Murdra is a mystery with too many secrets,” said Lenny, jabbing his fork at a sizzling bratwurst.

He stood beside Mo and Professor Mithra Buzzsaw around the hibachi grill, its surface hissing with heat. The air was thick with the smell of charred meat and suspicion.

“What does she keep in that big mission-style building?” Mo asked. “Nobody goes in. Nobody comes out. Just her.”

Mo wore scuffed green sneakers with a pine needle stuck in the sole. Lenny, ever more polished, wore dark loafers and clean khaki shorts. Mo’s were navy and wrinkled. They shared nothing in common but a love for field biology and a steady craving for trouble.

Together, the three of them—Lenny, Mo, and Professor Buzzsaw—had gone on all sorts of misadventures: cataloging slime molds, trapping fungal wasps, and once even camping out in one of Greenfeather’s fields, hoping to lure aliens with fist-sized blocks of fudge.

No one ever asked, “What will we do if they actually show up?”

They were too focused on their current obsession: getting inside Professor Murdra’s Mission—their code name for the secretive lab that only Murdra was allowed to enter.

Buzzsaw taught Botany, Biology 101 and 201, and Ecology at Peach Grove College in Scissors, Wylandia, nestled in the heart of the great global continent of Pangaea. His peers were Professor Greenfeather and Professor Murdra. Greenfeather was, like Buzzsaw, a botanist and a mycologist, though he specialized in agriculturally significant plants and fungi. He was a Scissors Indigenous tribal person—ruddy brown skin and long black hair (sometimes put up in a man bun) and deeply intuitive about soil. Murdra, on the other hand, was a middle-aged harpy, which meant she was at least eighty. Harpies were long-lived. She was an entomologist specializing in widow spiders.

Some argued it had something to do with their strange, secretive diets. Rarely would you see a harpy eat in public—and even when you did, whatever was in that thermos remained a mystery.

99% of harpies were female. They were a dying breed.

The rare male that was born invariably suffered from debilitating dwarfism. Small, frail, and often gone by age 22. For this reason, harpy boys were treated like sacred dolls—pampered, preserved, and protected. When they reached maturity, hundreds—sometimes thousands—of harpy women would line up, waiting hours for a chance to draw a sperm straw and do their part to continue the species.

And every harpy raised animals. Always small ones.

Most preferred toy breeds of dogs: Yorkies, Chihuahuas, Papillons. Others bred rats, hamsters, even rabbits. The creatures were beloved, obsessively groomed, swaddled in knitwear—and, as some whispered, possibly destined for more than just companionship.

Their food was a mystery Buzzsaw and his two assistants were determined to solve.

Lenny was convinced Murdra was running a contraband operation. “She’s got bootleg black market goods in there. Maybe linked to other warehouses by tunnels.”

Mo thought that was absurd. “It’s one giant meat locker,” he said. “She’s got missing persons in there. Hung like carcasses. Gray and disemboweled.”

So they did the only thing that made sense.

They decided to get Professor Buzzsaw to ask her out on a date.

Buzzsaw’s face folded into a complex map of regret and revulsion, but in the end, he agreed. He had to know what she was doing in that building every night after dark.

So, later that evening, with the stiffness of someone bracing for impact, he approached her office.

“Murdra,” he said with strained composure, “would you like to grab a bite to eat with me tonight?”