*A week after the events at Donut Pond, the disappearance of My Melody has been worrying everybody in her old neighborhood in Meriland, a couple of miles away from Sanrio Town. Flat, erstwhile albeit bashful mouse and intrepid friend of the missing rabbit, decides that the only way to find Melody was by taking action.

And so he does. But the biggest question on his mind was where to begin.*

          Well let’s see here. It isn’t easy looking for Melody, especially if the only leads you have involve baking cakes and musical notes filled with dark magic (although the latter might be a bit more noticeable, maybe). She’s a light little thing, won’t leave any prints anywhere unless it were made of wet cement, and even then, finding a set of footprints won’t explain why she’d been gone for over a week.

Which leaves me with the cake theory. Lovely. Just lovely.

The only other baker Melody trusted with all her heart, aside from her grandmother and herself, was Mr. Fruitcake, the old man who lived in that little bakeshop on 1st street, just beneath that banana tree that simply refuses to yield any fruit, although I have a lingering suspicion that the old man plucks all the ripe ones out just before the harvest. Now, old Fruitcake didn’t like me one bit, on account of me being a mouse - it was probably a business thing, nothing personal - but Melody was pressing business, which meant that he’ll have to deal with a mouse for a few minutes, at least. He’ll understand.

One good thing about being a mouse; you don’t make any noise when you go into houses. I must have startled Fruitcake out of his slippers when I said my helloes. He held a carving knife up at me, and asked me a gruff "What do you want, rat?"

"Whoa, away with the knife mister," I replied, backing away from him a few paces. "I just need to ask you some questions."

"You stay away from my pound cakes," he snarled. I didn’t notice that I was just a couple of centimeters away from one very fine example of championship pastry. With one last look of remorse at the cake, I moved away.

I scampered up the counter where he kept his cash register, and looked at old Fruitcake in the eye. "Look, mister, I know you don’t like me and you know I don’t like people that much. But I need your help."

"My help. I see," he growled, inching to me with the knife at the ready. "And just how can I, Fruitcake-Master Baker, be of any help to you, Master Mouse?" You could feel the sarcasm rip through the air like chain lightning. I was not happy to be here. Not at all.

"It’s My Melody. She’s missing."

The creases along his brow furrowed even more, but the cold look in his eyes softened, and his lips that had been set and stiff for a few minutes now, opened up into an o, and you could tell that he was grasping for words. "Me - melody? Missing? How? H - I mean, when?" Fruitcake moved closer to me, but he put down the knife, and pulled up a stool.

I quickly filled him in with the details. At length, Fruitcake was hunched over the counter, his head on his hands, which were worrying his temples of the little gray hair that was left there. "A week now! Great spirits of the pumpernickel, that poor rabbit’s defenseless out there in the wild! How could such a horrible thing happen to such a gentle, gentle soul . . . "

"I know all that, gramps," I growled (as much as a mouse could growl, anyway). "This is why I need your help. I’m going to go look for that silly little rabbit as best as I could, but I don’t know where to start. Is there anything you could tell me about the last time you saw her?"

"That was nearly a month ago. I’ll - I’ll have to remember." He leaned back on his stool and folded his arms across his chest, and almost immediately began to mutter to himself. I don’t know if this was how old people tried to remember things, but seeing old Fruitcake at it like a man going into senility, I decided that I couldn’t wait to turn seventy.

Did I ever mention that I was very, very sarcastic sometimes? People assume that just because I don’t talk much, I was a very nondescript kind of mouse. Kinda unfair, if you think about it - but I don’t make a fuss since it keeps them out of my hair.

He suddenly leapt out of his chair, surprising me so much that I nearly jumped out of the counter in fright. "The receipt!" he yelled, scrambling through his drawers frantically. "If I could remember what she ordered the last time we met, I could remember the conversation we had."

It took him a while to rifle through his multitudinous receipts, but the rate he was going at would have made any septegenarian proud. I believe he was going through ten receipts at a given moment, and he knew exactly what each one said. Must have been all those years, sitting at that counter. Personally, I’d have gone cuckoo after all that, but hey. Different folks, different strokes.

"Aha!" He held up one receipt, letting everything else drop down to the floor. "Here we are. She ordered, let’s see - it was five pound cakes, yes."

"What else did she say?" I asked heatedly, digging my paws into the wood of his countertop. I disliked all of this waiting.

"Hold on mouse, I’m trying to remember." He started pacing around, muttering phrases. "Let’s see, hi and hello, it’s a good day for a walk . . . no, not important. What are the pound cakes you have on stock today, nyan, how did you bake such awesome  - no, definitely trivial. What was it?"

This could go on forever. If I were to assume that the old man remembered all of his conversations for every receipt he handed out for the past thirty years, then he could very well be sifting through hundreds of nyan-filled conversations with Melody, and that would be a hundredth among thousands of everyday chitchat. If he could remember exactly what it was she said exactly during that transaction, then I was a monkey’s -

He stopped.

"Oh my," he muttered, getting back to his chair. "This isn’t good. You wouldn’t like this at all." He looked at me with eyes that were more furrowed than they ever were.

"What won’t I like, mister?" I asked. I should have expected his answer, though.

"She’s gone after Kuromi again."

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