UTC: Urgent Transformation Crisis

This scene was added during the final rewrite of this chapter, when I realized that Scurry needed to go away for the winter, and I figured that the next few chapters wouldn’t be good places to put a scene like this. As it turned out, the lasting effect of this scene on Flint dovetails with the other things he’s going through, so its inclusion at this point in the story was perfect.

In spite of the correction I made to the previous page, Flint erroneously uses the word “hibernation” here. I choose to believe he just couldn’t think of what else to call it right at that moment.