Page 30 - Demo

Natch!16Which brings us to Lucky, rounding out the th squad. As withmany things, there was no rhyme or reason why Lucky was hereand not there. My theory was that it was all part of the GrandBargain, struck between Nate and Betty when they first tookover. Nate had been willing to take Lucky as long as Betty tookJinx and Chance. It was really a %u201clesser of three evils%u201d kind ofbargain. Jinx was way too superstitious for Nate%u2019s taste andChance%u2026 well, Chance and Lucky were twin sons from differentmothers. With Lucky, about 50% of the time something reallygood might come along. With Chance, it was more or less anendless maze of random pings leading to utterly unpredictableconsequences and associations. To be fair, Chance wasn%u2019t aquitter. No matter the odds, he was willing to roll the dice. But asBetty was way more comfortable with the mess of creative chaos,it didn%u2019t take much convincing for her to take Chance and Jinx ifNate took Lucky. I mean, she was comfortable with chaos, buteveryone has limits.Of course, the chaos stirred by Jinx and Chance (andsometimes Betty herself) tended to act like fuel for Thena,Whimsy and Will. They resented it and thrived on it at the sametime. The three of them lived along the long, fickle, unpredictableedge of inspiration. Thena (short for Athena) lived furthest out,ever pushing the limits, re-imagining the box, remaking the box,tossing out the box altogether. She was great at brainstorming.Whimsy was just next door, not as purely creative, but often a bitmore playful%u2500if sometimes prone to spur-of-the-momentfixations that she didn%u2019t bother to think through. And then therewas Will, anchoring the lane, in some ways Gad%u2019s THcounterpart. Will brought practicality, logic, courage, anddecisiveness to his side of the stump. Above all, he valuedindependent thinking. Rumor had it that the Homp writer%u2014something-est Hemingway%u2014had been modeled after Will, sort ofa like a lifetime achievement award for the lemurs, but I can%u2019t