Tony flopped onto his dormitory bed. He stared blindly at the blank easel that had once held his Abstract Art.
"Do you think we'll ever find my painting?" he asked Jeff, who was typing madly away at the computer.
"We have to," Jeff replied, not even turning away from the computer. "And if I'm lucky, I'll be able to get Ness, Paula and Poo to help us."
"What do you mean?" Tony asked, sitting right up and ruffling his bedcovers.
"I'm e-mailing them right now to see if Ness can come over and hypnotise Maxwell into letting us leave."
"But you heard Maxwell, Jeff," Tony insisted. "He won't let us leave."
Jeff turned the computer off and turned to face Tony. "That may change."

Ness Lee pressed a button on his computer monitor, turning it on. He clicked the button that would open up Hotmail in Internet Explorer. He typed in his ISP user name and password, and selected Connect from the Dial-up Connection pop-up.
Ness tapped his fingers aimlessly on the computer desk while the modem screeched and beeped. Finally, he was connected to Onett@home. Hotmail loaded; he typed in his Hotmail user name and password, and waited for the Inbox to load.
Why do I bother with this? he thought to himself. No one ever e-mails me. They call me..
"Inbox 1 (1 new)," Ness read. "I wonder who it's from." He clicked the inbox link. "huntergreen@chosenfour.net."
Intrigued by the URL, Ness opened another Explorer window. He typed http://www.chosenfour.net/ in and hit Enter. The page didn't load. He hit F5; it didn't load again. He closed the window.
Ness clicked the e-mail itself, loading it. The e-mail was simple: "Call me."
"Call you?" Ness asked, reading the e-mail. "How am I supposed to call you if I don't know who you are? Maybe Jeff can help me find out who this is."
Ness logged off the Internet and picked up his phone. He dialed Snow Wood.
"Hello, this is Maxwell Labs!" the voice on the other end said cheerfully. "How may I direct your call?"
"Maxwell?" Ness asked. "Can I talk with Jeff?"
"One second." Maxwell left the line. Ness waited about ten seconds until he was forwarded to Jeff and Tony's dormitory line.
"Jeff?" Ness asked.
"So, I guess you got my e-mail?"
"Your e-mail?" Ness echoed. "The only e-mail I've gotten was from huntergreen@chosenfour.net. That's not you, is it?"
Jeff laughed over the line. "Of course it's me. Anyway, I was wondering if you could help us with a problem we're having over here. Could you Teleport over? And bring Paula with you?" He hung up.
Ness replaced the receiver, wondering what Jeff was getting at.
Then again, Jeff had been a very knowledgeable person. If there was a problem, he'd probably know it; and he'd know how best to fix it. So, Ness reasoned, he had been called because he was most capable of remedying the situation.
He ran downstairs. "Mom, I'm going out for a while! I'll see you later!"
Patricia Lee sighed as her son ran out the door. "Honestly," she muttered, "he's becoming so very much like his father that it's frightening."

"PSI Teleport Alpha!" Ness cried, running down the dirt road leading from the outlying area of Onett where he lived to the city centre. The world around him blurred, then faded away into pure white nothingness. He tried to block out the loudness of the warp so as not to become deaf, but ignoring the warp's volume would be difficult no matter how often he Teleported.
He landed on the main street of Onett's nearest neighbour, Twoson. He wished he could better control his Teleports so he could teleport right where he wanted, rather than somewhere in the same city; but he understood that that would likely require a lot of training, the training possibly taking many, many years.
He ran to Polestar Preschool in only three minutes. He rang the doorbell, and waited for someone to answer.
"Good evening, Ness," Mrs. Polestar, Paula's mother, said. "What brings you here?"
"Nothing much, Mrs. Polestar," Ness replied. "I need to talk with Paula, though."
"Would you like to join us for supper? We'll be only a few minutes."
"Thank you, Mrs. Polestar, but I'm not hungry. I'll wait outside."
"Wait inside," Mrs. Polestar insisted. "You don't have to eat if you don't want to."
She led Ness in. About twenty minutes later, Paula came out from the kitchen.
"Ness?" Paula asked. "Mom said you were here, but I can't understand why you would be here."
"Jeff e-mailed me. He's got a problem that he says he needs the two of us to help him with."
"Strange," Paula observed. "I got an e-mail from huntergreen@chosenfour.net that said 'Call me'. Is that Jeff?"
Ness nodded. "Come on. We should be going now."
Paula wished her parents goodbye, and then she and Ness walked outside. Ness charged up another Teleport Alpha, and the two of them were sent to Winters.

The Winters sky was dark, giving the moon, planets and stars a perfect backdrop to shine their brightest. It wasn't snowing; a check of a thermostat would have revealed that the temperature was, strangely enough, 1° Celsius. There was no wind either. It was as if the weather had climbed into a cave to hibernate.
"It's strange," Paula observed, checking her Indiglo watch. "It's midnight. I would think that Jeff and Tony would be in bed by now. And it should be colder," she added, looking at the thermostat on the Best Friend windowsill.
"What do you mean, Paula?" Ness asked. He was testing the fence and gate of Snow Wood to see if they could climb over them.
"It's 1° Celsius here, Ness," she replied. "And that makes it about 34° Fahrenheit. It's above freezing. It's Winters, in winter, at about midnight, and it's not below the freezing point? Something's going on here."
"Whatever," Ness muttered. "Do you want to go in or not? I just found a snow hill on our side that we can climb onto and over the fence with."
"Oh. Give me a minute." Paula loosened her scarf, letting it hang around her neck and over her thin but very warm crimson jacket.
"Isn't that kind of a waste, Paula?" Ness asked, cupping his hands over his ears. I wish I had a tuque... he muttered in his thoughts.
"I didn't expect it to be this warm, Ness," Paula replied, shrugging her shoulders. "But where's this hill?"
Ness led Paula over to the hill, located behind Best Friend. They climbed up and over.
Meanwhile, the thermostat slowly began to drop below zero.

Tony opened the door for Ness and Paula.
"Be quiet," he whispered. "Maxwell's office is in our way."
He motioned for Ness and Paula to follow him. He tiptoed past a set of rooms, being quiet so as not to be heard. They followed him, making sure their footsteps were as light as possible.
They made it to the staircase without being detected.
"Our dorm room's just up these stairs," Tony explained in his quietest tone. "We'll have to be especially quiet now, considering these stairs echo."
"Then how'd you get down without anyone hearing?" Ness asked.
"I slid down the bannister."
"Oh," Paula said. She gripped the bannister and climbed onto the part of the staircase that the bannister was attached to. She began to shuffle along and up.
She jumped off rather quietly once she was at the top. "Well?" she whispered, not sure if her friends would hear her. "Are you two coming?"
A few minutes passed, and Ness and Tony had ascended the bannister as well. Tony once more led the way to the dorm that he shared with Jeff.
He pulled a slip of paper from under his hat and slid it under the dorm door. Soon the door opened.
"Good night," Jeff said in a whisper. "Please, come in." He stepped back, and waited for Ness and Paula to enter. They did. Tony walked in and closed the door behind him.
"What did you want us here for, Jeff?" Paula asked, unzipping her jacket.
Jeff pointed to the easel. "An Abstract Art once stood there. But it's been stolen."
"Abstract art?" Paula then asked, disbelieving. "Ness, wouldn't you consider that a waste of our time?"
She turned towards Ness. But his face, rather than being the half-tan, half-peach that it ought to have been, was pale.
"...Moonside," he managed, the name coming out like a squeak.