Paul was awoken by a clicking noise.  He didn’t particularly want to be awoken, though, so he stayed curled up in his warm bed with his eyes closed.  He figured that Brian had probably come to wake them up for an “early start,” as he too often did.  Still, Paul wished the manager had waited until after the wake-up call, at least.

Yep, there he is, thought Paul grimly as he heard a floorboard creak.

“’M coming, ‘m coming,” he mumbled sleepily, pulling his covers over his head.

He heard nothing.  He started to fall asleep again.

Hang on, that’s odd, Paul suddenly thought.  Shouldn’t he have said something by now?

The bassist pulled back down the sheet slightly and cracked one of his eyes open tentatively, preparing to be blinded by the morning sun.  However, the hotel room was still pitch black, the only light coming from the illuminated face of the alarm clock, which marked the time as 2:18.

Paul opened his other eye and turned his head, scanning the room.

There.  The door connecting his and Ringo’s room with John and George’s was open a crack.  And next to it stood a shadowy figure, holding something long and thin in its hand.

Paul swore mentally.

“What’re you doing in here?” he squeaked in a feeble attempt to be authoritative.

“Shh!” whispered the figure, putting a finger to its lips.

“I will not shush!” said Paul loudly, recovering his voice.

“Shut up!  You’ll wake him up!” replied the figure in a familiar Scouse accent.

“John?” whispered Paul, pushing himself into a sitting position.

“Yeah, of course, you idiot!  Who else’d be sneaking into your room at 2:30 in the morning?” hissed John as he approached Ringo’s bed.

“What’ve you got in your hand?” asked Paul, swinging his legs out of bed.

John snickered.  “He had it coming,” he said, gesturing to sleeping Ringo.

Paul got out of bed.  “What’re you going to do to him?” he asked, now wide awake.

John pulled something out of his pajama’s pocket and tossed it to Paul.  Paul caught another long, thin thing like the item John was holding.

“It’s a marker,” muttered Paul slowly, uncapping the pen.  Ringo continued to snore, blissfully unaware of the conversation taking place at his bedside.

“Does he wake up if you turn on the light?” asked John.  “It’s hard to tell the colours apart in the dark.”

“Erm, probably not,” replied Paul.  “He doesn’t usually, and he was pretty knackered earlier.”

Without further ado, John reached over to the bedside lamp and flicked it on.  Yellow light flooded the room.  Paul blinked.

“Oi!  A bit of warning would be nice next time,” said Paul, disgruntled.

John emptied his bulging pockets in a businesslike manner.  Paul tossed his marker onto the pile of pens, markers, glitter glue tubes, and packets of coloured feathers now languishing haphazardly on the bedside table.

“When did you get all these?” wondered Paul, no longer bothering to keep his voice down.  It seemed clear that Ringo was down for the count.

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” replied John with a smirk.  He reached for a thick black marker.  “We’ll start simple, I think.”

“We?”

“Unless you want to go back to sleep and miss out on the fun, that is.”

“I’ll just watch, thanks.”

John set to work drawing a Hitler moustache onto Ringo’s upper lip.  “Just a little bit more there,” muttered John, tongue between his teeth as he worked.  The yellow lamplight reflected off of John’s glasses.

Paul snickered as he sat down on his bed to watch the show.

“What’s going on in here?” asked a third voice groggily.  John and Paul whipped around to see George standing in the doorway, wearing a ratty blue bathrobe and a scowl.

“Nothing,” said Paul innocently.

“Art,” said John simultaneously.  “Art with a political message.”

George ambled over to Ringo’s bedside, where John had started drawing pointillist dolphins in pink and turquoise on Ringo’s right cheek.

George raised an eyebrow a la Spock.

“What’s the political message?” the youngest Beatle asked skeptically.

“Don’t rat out your friends,” answered John promptly as he outlined the pointillist dolphins in purple glitter glue.

“Do you want to watch with me?” invited Paul, patting the space on the bed next to him.

“You know, you were driving just about as terribly as is humanly possible,” said George.

“That’s no reason to tattle tale to Brian, now is it?” asked John, jutting out his chin thoughtfully as he squeezed a hefty dollop of gold glitter glue onto Ringo’s forehead.

George shrugged as he joined Paul on the bassist’s bed.

“I reckon Paul and I should be getting revenge on you for nearly murdering us with your awful driving,” mused George contemplatively.  Ringo continued to snore loudly as John pushed orange- and green-dyed feathers into the gold glitter glue on the drummer’s forehead.

“Leave me out of it, mate,” said Paul quickly.

“I’d like to see you try,” said John, doodling a dog onto Ringo’s left cheek in blue marker.  On a whim, he added a diaper to the dog’s rear end.

“Challenge accepted,” replied George, leaning back on the bed.  Paul looked rather alarmed.

John grabbed a finer, red pen from the desk and wrote “You’re our favourite, lover boy,” onto the dog’s diaper.

Ringo mumbled something incomprehensible.  John leapt back, clambered over Paul’s bed between Paul and George, and crouched behind the piece of furniture.  Paul reached over and turned out the light.

The three guitarist Beatles sat in silence.

“No, no . . . that’s too much now . . . ah, there we go,” muttered Ringo.

“D’you think he’s sleep talking?” whispered Paul.

“Shh!” whispered John.

Ringo resumed snoring.  After another minute of tense silence, Paul turned back on the light.

Ringo looked much the same as before.  George, however, was holding several tubes of glitter glue, one of which was aimed directly at John’s face.  One of the lenses of John’s glasses had already been completely covered in the sparkly pink goop.

John yelped and yanked the glasses off his face, tossing them to an alarmed Paul.

“You’re gonna pay for this, Harrison!” shouted John, lunging at George.  Paul put the glasses on the bedside table and managed to leap off the bed and out of the way as John tackled the youngest Beatle.

George laughed madly, squirting glitter glue all over John’s red pajamas.  John cackled as he grabbed the rest of the glitter glue from the bedside table.

Ringo stirred uneasily as George leapt onto John’s back, pushing John onto the floor.

“Break it up, guys!  Break it up!” called Paul, leaping into the fray.  Soon his blue-and-white-striped pajamas had acquired many more stripes of various colours.

“’s it time to go?” asked Ringo blearily, sitting up.  A single droplet of golden glitter glue meandered down his nose as he watched the other three rolling around on the floor, giggling like mad.

“What’s going on?” the drummer asked.

Paul was doubled over on the carpet, laughing silently, as George kneeled next to him, tickling his stomach.  John was standing, dancing around George as he squirted bright yellow glitter glue into George’s hair.  John started singing a nursery rhyme.  Ringo noticed at this point that something was on his nose and crossed his eyes to see the droplet of golden glitter glue dangling from the end of his nose.

That was when Brian opened the door, closely followed by Mal and Neil.

“What in God’s name happened in here?” exclaimed their manager.

George stopped tickling Paul and looked up at Brian.  Paul wheezed, gathering some of his breath back.  Ringo stopped batting at his nose to get rid of the glitter glue.  John stopped singing and dancing to look up at Brian, but continued absentmindedly squirting the glitter glue into George’s mop top.

“We thought you’d been attacked or something!” shouted Mal.  “You’ve woken up two floors of the hotel, at least!”

“You’re lucky it’s us and not the hotel owner in here!” ranted Neil.

“You need to clean up now, before that glue hardens in your hair!  We can’t have it cut out!” moaned Brian.

John deliberately stopped squirting the glue into George’s hair and walked over to Brian slowly.  He got nose to nose with the manager.

They stared at each other.

“But of course,” said John finally, sarcasm dripping from his every syllable.  “Right away, sir.”

He slowly raised the glitter glue above Brian’s head.  The world seemed to move in slow motion as everyone else’s eyes widened.

“No!” gasped Paul.  Everyone else couldn’t seem to speak.

“You really think so?” asked John, turning his head slightly in Paul’s direction, eyes still locked on Brian.

“We’ve done enough damage tonight,” pointed out Paul.  “Save it for later.”

John reluctantly lowered the glitter glue.

“Next time you’d better be ready, Eppy,” warned John as he stalked off to his own room.

Brian, Neil and Mal surveyed Ringo’s face, Paul and George’s glitter-covered pajamas, the formerly beige carpet, and the sheets strewn across the floor.

“You lot are in so much trouble,” commented Ringo.