2 PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER

CHAPTER TWO PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER Maybe because Igor was a mix of so many different animals, he had a lot of different interests. He liked cake decorating and karate and banana wrestling, which might sound easy, but Franny had accidentally created a pretty fierce banana, and it was Igor's job to play with it so it didn't become bored and start getting into trouble. Igor's newest hobby was jigsaw puzzles, which took a long time for him to complete, since his little fingers

were kind of stubby and plump. Franny had no interest in solving a puzzle that others had solved before, so Igor put them together by himself.

This was fine with Franny because it allowed her to work on her experiments without Igor's help, and sometimes no help was exactly what she was in the mood for.

Franny was especially excited about her newest invention, the Mixer-Upper Machine. She'd gotten the idea from Granny Franny's soup. "I made it with parts from a broken blender and an old nuclear reactor I had lying around. With it, I can combine good stuff to make something even better."

For one of her first Mixer-Upper experiments, she put a substitute teacher in it with a ruler. The machine made a whirring sound like a blender, and then it dinged like a microwave. When Franny opened the door, the substitute teacher and the ruler had combined to make a foot-long sub. It flopped around on the plate and threatened to make Franny stay after school unless she separated them again.

"Fine," Franny said. "I'll unmix you. But you might be making a mistake. Not everybody likes substitute teachers, but everybody can appreciate a delicious foot- long sub." "Change me back!" the sub yelled.