A Grundo ran into Dr. F. Sloth's office, where our favorite evil genius was . . . not. Blinking in surprise, the Grundo looked around until he caught sight of a note on the back of his master's chair: "Gone to rewrite the main navigational program; please wait outside."

The little purple Grundo stepped out of the office quickly, clutching the letter he held. Suddenly he backed right into Sloth's flowing black robe. "Eep!"

"You have a message for me?" asked the doctor, looking down at his lackey with mild amusement. "Let me see." He pulled the letter from the Grundo's hands and began reading. "Oh . . . oh my . . . oh, this is incredible . . ."

Sloth leaned over and said to the Grundo with a smile (a HAPPY smile, something this little pet had never seen on Sloth's face before), "Go tell everyone here that NPv2 is back."

"Okay, that's it," snapped Sloth. "I'm going to give them a clue. It'll make things SO much more entertaining." He scribbled a P.S. on the end of his letter: "Heh heh heh . . . ok here's a clue . . . you won't be able to get any information from the first programmer; his mouth will be full of that vile purple vegetable he loves so much."

Ignoring Sailor Chia's protests, he folded up the letter and sent it off in the hands of a Grundo delivery boy.

"Well, what do you expect? The moon on a stick?" Zoe shot back. Our heroines were gathered in Leslie's NeoHome, while their pets hung out outside of it.

"How many purple vegetables can there be, though?" Leslie asked.

"Eggplant and ummagine," Melony offered.

"Purple juppies? No, wait, that's a fruit," Kami mused.

"So let's look up eggplants and ummagines," Leslie directed. "In the Shop Wizard and the item lookup."

"Shouldn't we visit the shops where they're sold, too?" asked Zelda.

"She just SAID the Shop Wizard!" Ji exclaimed scornfully.

"I mean like the Desert Food store in the Lost Desert, genius!" Zelda snapped.

"Well, YOU two won't be going in the same group," Jody declared.

"Hey, Ji, race ya to the Lost Desert!" Brooke cried, slapping the short brunette on the back.

'Not a bad idea," Leslie remarked. "Ji, Brooke, go to the Lost Desert. Zelda, Naomi, go check the Shop Wizard for both ummagines and eggplant. Kami, Zoe, look up both of them in the item search, okay? Melony, Jody, Ko-Kira, Kara Lynn, check the local shops that sell eggplants - Health Food and normal food. I'll keep an eye on the TV for any news updates; keep in touch if you find anything. Got it?"

"Got it." "Sure." "All right." "'Kay." "No problem." "On our way!"

"Go on," Leslie prompted.

"We looked up ummagines and found out that there's an item called an Ummagine Plushie! Not only that, but only one shop has them, and it also has Ummagine T-shirts, Ummagine Cake, and tons of other ummagine stuff - guess what the username is? Vpets_storage4!"

Leslie stared. "Definitely not a coincidence. Should we come to his shop?"

"No - go to the NeoHome," Naomi broke in. "It's at 102478 Soup Alley."

"Got it." Leslie started calling the other sailors and Kara Lynn. The search was in full swing...

"How do you know?" queried Abbie, who had detransformed and was doing her nails.

"There are motion sensors in the front door," Sloth explained. "They're rigged to count how many people go in and out. Only, when he retired he left his gadgets with me, including the one that counts how many people are entering his shop. I dug it out, with some others, to keep track of the Neopians' progress."

"I noticed," Abbie said dryly, glancing around at all the gizmos hanging and/or piled around Sloth's office. "Ten codes to deactivate NPv2. Four programmers to find, plus the program itself to solve, in order to get all of them. And without them, the kids that that program trapped in the VirtuLift will run out of air.

"Say," she said, pointing to a box on the corner of Sloth's desk, "what does it mean when that one beeps?"

"It means," Sloth explained, "that someone - well, several someones - are outside Blarthrox's NeoHome."

"Come in, come in!" he exclaimed, ushering the surprised girls into his NeoHome. Inside were ummagine carpets, ummagine-colored chairs, walls papered with an ummagine pattern, ummagine carpets, pictures of ummagines on the wall, and actual ummagines in bowls all over. All eleven visiting girls were dumbstruck.

"Yes; awesome, isn't it?" said the Grundo proudly. "I have my whole house decorated with ummagine items. My diet consists entirely of ummagines and related foods. I - oh, excuse me, I haven't introduced myself. My name is Blarthrox. You needn't tell me your names; I forget them so easily! Anyhow -"

"Excuse me, Mr. Blarthrox," Ji interrupted, "but we're not here to hear about your stu-"

Zelda grabbed Ji and clapped a hand over the shorter girl's mouth. "What my friend is trying to say," she said hurriedly, "is, were you one of the programmers for the artificial intelligence that calls itself NeoPets Version 2?"

"Why, yes," Blarthrox replied, startled. "You know of it?"

Leslie outlined the situation with the kids in the VirtuLift. "Ah, I see. There's only one way to deactivate that - we designed a console that'll turn it off if you enter the right numbers. Only Frank knew the whole code, though - and my console I left with him when I retired."

"Do you remember the codes you knew?" Jody asked.

"Let's see . . . eighty-four . . . nineteen. Good luck on getting those kids out - NPv2 was never meant to do that sort of thing."

As they left, Zoe said in a low voice, "I looked on his pet page - he has a friend whose owner is named Virtulogorex."

"Hey, guys," Ji said suddenly, "look at this!" She pulled a letter from Blarthrox's mailbox and held it up. "It's got the VirtuPets logo and no return address."

Leslie pulled a notebook out of her Sailor Senshi E-Z Storage Subdimensional Locker Extraordinaire. "So he's not as distanced from VirtuPets as he'd like us to think . . . what's in the letter?"

"Just a bunch of gibberish."

"Let me copy it down anyway."

She did, and Ji replaced the letter, and Melony added, "There was a question hidden in there: 'Who are you?' Maybe we should write that down too."

Leslie was copying it down anyway.

The poem was on the bottom of the pet page of virtulogorex's Grundo, Zyrolon. She'd also jotted down the question in virtulogorex's lookup, 'Who created you?'; the time when Zyrolon said he started work, three o'clock; and a sketch of a metal devourer, which was on the page. "It's from NeoQuest," Melony had explained.

They waited until three-thirty, at which Kami complained, "He's not here. We're at a dead end!"

"Let's take a break," Leslie suggested. "Go over what we have already . . . brainstorm." The others quickly agreed, and they went their separate ways.

"Nah, it's just that I'm in the maze part," Moe explained. "Oh great - I got attacked."

"Hey, Mel," called Ko-Kira, "it's a metal devourer. Want to watch?"

So Melony came over to watch, and Moe defeated the metal devourer easily. "Hold on," said Mel as Moe was about to move on. "What's that line of numbers in the corner?"

"Dunno . . . I've never noticed it," said her pet with a shrug.

"Keep that game where it is!" Mel jumped up and called Leslie. "You still have that notebook handy?"

"Right here," came Leslie's voice over the communicator. "Why?"

"Moe's NeoQuest game has an area to enter numbers that only appeared when he beat a metal devourer. Got anything we've found that would work?"

"Um . . ." Leslie thumbed through it. "No, not except the gibberish from Blarthrox's letter."

"That's too long, there are only eight spaces." Melony sighed. "Drat. I thought we were on to something." She closed the call.

Five minutes later, Leslie called back. "I was talking with Kara Lynn and I think she found something!" she cried. "Let me show you!" She held the notebook up to the communicator screen. Eight words were highlighted.

Melony read them, puzzled: "Ate to oh for too to won to . . . so what?"

"I'll try that," said Ko-Kira as Moe beat another metal devourer. In the row of numbers she set them to '82042212'.

"I think we have something here," she announced as NeoQuest began loading something completely different from the Dank Caves map . . .

"NeoQuest gave us some freaky computer code!" With that, Melony, Naomi, and Ko-Kira were falling over each other trying to explain. Somehow Zelda got the whole story out of their clamor.

She trudged over to her computer and sleepily moved the mouse, deactivating the screen saver. "Okay, let's see the code."

"Here." The communicator was held up to the NeoQuest screen.

"Hey . . . that's subroutine code . . . I bet it'll decode Blarthrox's mail." Sleepy as she was, Zelda sounded excited. She started typing. "There . . . got it . . . gah, I'm so tired . . . okay, I've got Blarthrox's mail . . . hang on . . . part of it's still coded, wait a minute . . . okay, that's it. G'night." She switched off the communicator call and trudged sleepily back to bed, turning off her communicator for the night.