And as he peered into the tunnel, his fat body half-buried in the dirt, he saw a thing tramping hard from the shadows upon him.  Tweek let out a squeak of terror.

And what popped out from the shadows was a little girl.

Now when I call her little, I mean that, exactly.  She was little as little could be, even littler than you might think.  She was littler than Tweek himself, and was no bigger than your hand.

Now, when I call her a `girl’, I mean that, but not exactly.  She was a girl, but not a human kind of girl.  She was one of the Theeroi, and she had lost her way as they drove the demons out of their burrows.  Theeroi girls, I should mention, are every bit as ferocious as the boys, and whenever they go to war, they all go to war together.  They’re not very nice, and they’re not very pretty to look at.

This girl was the usual sort.  Though she might be quite ugly to look at, by our way of thinking, she was, according to the way of the Theeroi, very, very beautiful, indeed.  She was dirty and her hair was a shaggy mass.  The Theeroi almost never wash, you see – since they live in the earth, they don’t see dirt as `dirty’, the way we do.  And they never brush their hair, even when they’ve slept on it all wrong.  They like to sharpen their teeth into tiny points, and they’ll eat anything that breathes.

If you leave them alone, they’ll leave you alone, by and large.  But if you bother them, they’ll gang up on you and eat you.  And there’s just no stopping and angry, hungry throng of Theeroi when they come swarming up out of the ground, so it’s best just to leave them alone, and to be as polite as you can possibly be, if you happen to bump into one.

This girl had a name that I could not write down, no matter how hard I tried, because it is made of sounds that nobody has ever invented letters for.  (We make a lot of sounds that have no letters, if you stop to think about it.)

But, if you’ve ever heard a yippy, yappy little lap dog sneeze, then you might have an idea of what this girl’s name sounded like.  Just to make it easy for both of us, I’ll simply call her `Chew’.

When Chew stumbled upon Tweek, he gave her a terrible fright.  All she saw was the top of his head and his two bulbous eyes peering out from the dirt, and she stumbled backward with a huge gasp of air.

“Huh!” is what she said.

Now she’d already helped in killing and eating a half-dozen demons, so she was already very tired, and her belly quite full.  And, however terrible and ferocious the Theeroi may be when there are hundreds of them in a swarm, by themselves they are small things, and usually pretty helpless.  It’s very easy to squash a single Theeroi, and they are very sensitive to that, so they usually only go about in great multitudes.

But Chew was alone, and she suddenly found herself confronted by, what was to her, a very big demon, one who peered at her with terrifying eyes from the dirt.  So Chew was very, very frightened.

 They both stayed like that for a long moment, each watching to see what the other was going to do, and each certain that the moment was to be their last.

But they only stood there blinking at each other, too frightened to move.

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