He was beginning to wonder whether the problems they had had on the way to delivering letters were not just coincidences. The way the Demoness Metria had tried to distract him from his mission and faded out in annoyance when it didn't work. Or when that girl Caitlin had lured him into the comic strip where there was the panty trap, and then it had seemed that Caitlin wasn't exactly where or what he had thought she was—could there have been a fake Caitlin trying to get him in trouble? And the appearance of the Dire Strait, getting them into trouble again—and the reappearance of the deadly whirlpool. There had also been the way Fracto Cloud had come; had he been looking for them, to mess them up? Umlaut didn't want to be paranoid, but he wondered. Suppose Metria had tried it herself, then emulated Caitlin, then talked Scylla and Charybdis into intercepting the party? She could certainly have talked to Fracto. How she could have gotten the whirlpool to come to Xanth he wasn't sure, but it did seem to have happened.
