Duo was having a Very Bad Day. Thursdays usually meant closing the repair shop an hour early, venturing to Sun’s Kitchen for a weekly restocking of the bare essentials of his pantry (and anything else that he could nab without being noticed—ya snooze ya lose, right?) and then finding a telephone booth in the area to make his weekly phone call to Howard, mainly consisting of Howard griping about the laziness of the other Sweepers and making sure Duo wasn’t dead.

Instead, he’d found himself to a late start after getting his braid stuck in the sink drain (not the most functional person in the morning, Duo), then working an hour overtime on a wind-up music box that the owner insisted had to be ready tomorrow to give as an anniversary present. Duo normally wasn’t a huge fan of that kind of job, who’d ever heard of emergency music box repair anyway, but his funds were still too tight to turn any kind of work away. The music box had perversely refused to open for two hours despite a thorough application of oil and all the swear words in Duo’s mental vocabulary, only to reveal that a dead bug had simply been caught in the gears.