The crowd's faces were hard and bitter, leaving no doubt in my mind that I was in deep shit. Even Dan, sitting in the front row, looked angry. I nearly started crying right then. Dan -- oh, Dan. My pal, my confidant, my patsy, my rival, my nemesis. Dan, Dan, Dan. I wanted to beat him to death and hug him at the same time. Lil took the podium and tucked stray hairs behind her ears. "All right, then," she said. I stood to her left and Debra stood to her right. "Thanks for coming out today. I'd like to get this done quickly. We all have important work to get to. I'll run down the facts: last night, a member of this ad-hoc vandalized the Hall of Presidents, rendering it useless. It's estimated that it will take at least a week to get it back up and running. "I don't have to tell you that this isn't acceptable. This has never happened before, and it will never happen again. We're going to see to that. "I'd like to propose that no further work be done on the Mansion until the Hall of Presidents is fully operational. I will be volunteering my services on the repairs." There were nods in the audience. Lil wouldn't be the only one working at the Hall that week. "Disney World isn't a competition," Lil said. "All the different ad-hocs work together, and we do it to make the Park as good as we can. We lose sight of that at our peril." I nearly gagged on bile. "I'd like to say something," I said, as calmly as I could manage. Lil shot me a look. "That's fine, Julius. Any member of the ad-hoc can speak." I took a deep breath. "I did it, all right?" I said. My voice cracked. "I did it, and I don't have any excuse for having done it. It may not have been the smartest thing I've ever done, but I think you all should understand how I was driven to it. "We're not _supposed_ to be in competition with one another here, but we all know that that's just a polite fiction. The truth is that there's real competition in the Park, and that the hardest players are the crew that rehabbed the Hall of Presidents. They _stole_ the Hall from you! They did it while you were distracted, they used _me_ to engineer the distraction, they _murdered_ me!" I heard the shriek creeping into my voice, but I couldn't do anything about it. "Usually, the lie that we're all on the same side is fine. It lets us work together in peace. But that changed the day they had me shot. If you keep on believing it, you're going to lose the Mansion, the Liberty Belle, Tom Sawyer Island -- all of it. All the history we have with this place -- all the history that the billions who've visited it have -- it's going to be destroyed and replaced with the sterile, thoughtless shit that's taken over the Hall. Once that happens, there's nothing left that makes this place special. Anyone can get the same experience sitting at home on the sofa! What happens then, huh? How much longer do you think this place will stay open once the only people here are _you?_"