“Tag!” the lady shrieked, shoving a crumpled piece of paper at Mumbo.

Confused, Mumbo straightened out the paper and read it. Tag one other person. No tag-backs!

He knew that handwriting. Of course he did.

Mumbo wasn’t really surprised that Grian had started a tag game on Luke’s cruise ship somehow. The guy started tag games at every possible opportunity.

“That wasn’t a very creative way to tag someone,” he started to say, but the snakelike prison guard lady who Annabeth said was an actual snake lady had already hurried away.

Well, Mumbo had to tag someone, didn’t he? For Grian.

Annabeth was the obvious option, but… well, Annabeth was the obvious option. She was also asleep. There was no fun in tagging someone who was asleep.

But it wasn’t like Mumbo ever saw anyone else.

But how could he even think about backstabbing his new ally? Never! They were about to escape, they couldn’t take the tag with them!

No, Mumbo had to get rid of this paper before they left.

He just had to find a way out of this ridiculously luxurious suite…

The guard lady was outside, singing in a terribly raspy voice hits such as Bohemian Rhapscaledy, Never Gonna Give Rats Up, and Highway to Tartarus. He just needed a distraction.

“Annabeth,” he said, shaking the demigod’s shoulder. “Wake up.”

Annabeth stirred and glared at him. “What?”

“I have the tag,” Mumbo said. “And I want your help to go tag someone.”

“Excuse me?”

Mumbo showed her the tag.

“There is no point to this,” Annabeth grumbled, even as she sat up and combed her fingers through her hair.

Mumbo smiled brightly.

Annabeth sighed dramatically and knocked on the door.

The lady opened it.

“I heard there's karaoke,” Annabeth said. “In the west lounge.”

The snake lady gasped, not even questioning how they would know that and she didn't. “Karaoke?!”

“Yeah, you gotta go share those amazing vocal talents!”

The lady scrambled off in the weird way a lot of the ladies on this ship walked. Almost like they were gliding. Or slithering. Well, apparently she was a snake person, so that made sense.

“That was much easier than I expected,” Mumbo mumbled.

“Yeah, why'd you even wake me up?” Annabeth asked, and then proceeded to go back to bed.

Mumbo slipped out of the room and started wandering around, looking for someone to tag.

He heard a couple of voices in a room that looked slightly more important than most of the suites. He figured that would be a good place to find someone to tag.

It was a large meeting room of some kind, lined with couches and a large table. Curtains in front of the windows concealed the wind and snowstorm outside. There was a large gold coffin thing on one side of the room that made Mumbo uneasy. They need to return that to whatever museum they got it from.

The room contained the blonde guy with the scar who had interrogated Mumbo a couple days ago and a random bear, both lounging on couches as if bears weren’t dangerous. If he could tag the guy…

He just needed to figure out a creative way to do it. It didn’t say anything about that on the tag itself, but Grian would have wanted him to do it in a ridiculously elaborate way. Did he have enough redstone in his inventory to make a punching machine? Maybe he could hang from the chandelier. Or throw a potato.

Mumbo didn’t have enough redstone to spare from their escape communicator, but he did have a couple of baked potatoes.

Well, he was about to get violent with the peace, love and plants. He split the potato with his fingers, shoved the tag in, and threw it as hard as he could with a battle cry of “PEACE, LOVE, AND PLANTS!”

It hit the dude with the scar right smack in the forehead. He’d told the other hermits that veganism was good luck.

His victim jumped to his feet, sword instantly out. Mumbo decided that now was a good time to run.

As he did, he heard the disgruntled voice of the guy reading out the tag to his bear friend and talking about how stupid it was. He was probably going to throw it away. Mumbo decided that was not his problem; his work was done.

He hurried back into his little prison suite. Annabeth sat up as he entered. “You did it.”

“Why do you look surprised?”

“I don’t know. You just don’t seem very bright.”

“I am plenty bright, thank you very much!”

“You have potato all over your hands. Why do you have potato all over your hands?”

Mumbo went into the bathroom to wash it off, defeated.

Then he sat down at the coffee table to start putting those communicator blueprints to use.

Only a few more hours. And then he could contact Xisuma and go home.

And restock on potatoes. He was running low on potatoes.