The operation was a success. We set up in the tack room of my great grandpa's barn. He's got an old short wave tube radio in there that @Zora Dyne said would be good for amplifying her song and reaching the Generators. We put the Electric Eric in a bucket in the middle of the room. And we set drooly Alastor Dimitri II up in a saddle on one of the saw horses and wrapped his hand around the rigging like he was fixin' to ride a bronco. We weren't half wrong about that.

It wasn't long before Zora Dyne had her song flying through the airwaves and the room got real cold. The electric bulb hanging from the ceiling flickered and the flashes played tricks with our eyes, like it was a room full of banshees and static, all the while Zora Dyne's song getting bigger and the radio getting wilder, and the Electric Eric thumping around in the bucket.

Suddenly Alastor Dimitri II sits bolt upright in his saddle and starts jerking around, his free hand flailing and his feet flying up in the air. I wasn't sure how long this was going to go on, so I went inside my great grandpa's house and got a coke out of the fridge. Great grandma was in the kitchen sorting through some bills but she had to ask me about school and how I was doing and what my final project for Dark 4-H was going to be, and wanted to remind me that she won first prize in Evil Chicken Wrangling when she was in school. I finished my coke and thanked her and went back to the barn.

When I returned, Alastor Dimitri II was foaming at the mouth but had mostly stopped convulsing. The light was steady again and Zora Dyne was sitting in the dusty chair by the radio, slowly tuning the dial. The Electric Eric was still.

We let Alastor Dimitri II sleep it off in the spare room at my great grandpa's. He was able to shower and dress himself, which wasn't something the body was able to do prior to the operation. After a big farm breakfast of sunny side up eggs, pancakes, bacon, fried spam, toast, jelly, tomato preserves, potatoes, and sausage, I returned him to his old dorm room, where I believe the familiarity of his surroundings will no doubt help him recover his memories. In due time.

As for my final project for Dark 4-H, I'm considering a project involving the wireless transmission of consciousness. Thank you @Alastor Dimitri!

The Teen Building Workshop was a success, and I have built my teen. We'd done most the work during the workshop itself, but then our teens had to gestate in the amniotic tanks for a good couple of weeks. It's a good process, and I could see it becoming popular for cranking out a few extra farmhands when you need them at harvest time. I've signed up to be a franchisee and plan on selling the kits door to door this summer. Plus it'll go towards my Entrepreneurial Badge for Dark 4-H.

Rather than using one of the 5 sample templates that come with the kit, I've left mine unimprinted, leaving it open for @Alastor Dimitri to inhabit. Once we finally track him down, that is. In the meantime he (Alastor Dimitri II) just kind of sits in the corner, humming to himself.

It won't be too much longer, boy.

On the side, I raise Fire Bunnies. Most people think it's just for little kids, on account of just how cute those Fire Bunnies can be. But I find great solace tending my fire-proof hutches, stroking the bunnies with my asbestos gloves. And in the pantheon of Dark 4-H Animal Husbandry, who'd want to raise Skunk-chickens? Or Spiny Death Horses? The Fire Bunnies are where it's at.

So I'm at the Psychic Feed n' Seed, picking up a 30lb sack of Fire Bunny Chow, and noticed a flyer for the Teen Building Workshop. "Build a Teen!" "All materials supplied!" "Teens Guaranteed!" And I thought heck, that's something I've never done. So I'm planning on attending this upcoming workshop. I'm going to build a teen.

But not just any teen. I'm going to build an @Alastor Dimitri.

This school is crawling with rats. You don't see em because they stick to the shadows at night, but they're easy enough to spot with the infrared on my drones. It would be a waste to murder them, so I've got live-trap scoops to capture them and store them in my menagerie.

My cousin Bill Hatchet works for the the Walmart Supersensorium, Enforcement Division, and he thinks there would be a market for my rat catching drones. I've just got to figure out how to scale production. But he says the big market is in remote controlled animal simulacra, for surveillance and dirty tricks.

Still no sign of @Alastor Dimitri though. Either he's left campus or used the turbo drills built into @Mr. Hazeldell's automaton to burrow way down into the earth, I figure. Sure would like to run into him though. Seems like my kind of guy.

In shop class we're building drones. They have many agricultural applications, but from a Dark 4-H perspective their use is clear: cattle rustling.

Guiding the drones on a mission like this is simple enough. And with just a couple of electrified wires hanging down a few feet below the drones you can create a cattle prod effect. By flying over the herd and lightly brushing them with the wires you can cut out the animals you want and then herd them a couple miles to the awaiting trucks.

I was at the soldering table attaching these electrified danglers when who should I run into but old @Mr. Hazeldell. He had the big electromagnets out and was maneuvering them over his chest. It looked like a serious operation.

"Dagnabbit this buckshot!" he said.

Having had some experience with the removal of buckshot from the body, I asked him if I might be able to lend a hand.

"It's that polecat @Alastor Dimitri! Kids these days are out of control! He commandeered my Electric Eric, and when I attempted to defuse the situation with my trusty shotgun Louisa, he reversed the local polarity and threw the hot lead back at me like a bucket of bees!"

It seems some of the buckshot got wedged deep inside his pacemaker and he was using the school's mighty electromagnets to try and wiggle them free. A quick look at him through the shop's MRI showed that the shrapnel was angling close to his aorta.

"Well, I was afraid it'd come to this. Here, stick this in me."

He handed me a horseshoe-shaped implement, throbbing with a cool blue plasma glow.

"That's got to go around the pacemaker. It'll keep those pieces of metal from getting any closer to my heart, though it's going to produce a great deal of excess energy as well. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Go on, son, time to operate!"

We got it implanted into his chest neatly enough, given the range of tools available in the shop. As I was finishing up the cauterization I asked what had become of @Alastor Dimitri.

"He blew a hole in the wall and tore out of there like a bat out of hell. No telling where he headed off to. I'm afraid it'll be quite a while till that boy's batteries run down."

I offered to get him some ibuprofen or something, but he said he'd be fine with the bottle of rye he kept in his desk for occasions just like this.

Perhaps I will give my cattle rustling drones a dry run around campus, and take a look for this Electric Eric that @Alastor Dimitri's holed up in.

Me and Jerk Ramsey started experimenting with his grandpa's old gene splicing kit in the fourth grade. We set it up in the hayloft of his barn and started with chickenkittens, just because with all the barn cats and a coop full of eggs nobody'd notice a few gone missing, or coming back all rearranged. We moved up to pigdogs, ratcrows, horsepossums, catbats, and even an ostrilambacoon. We took to showing them at county fairs and won a number of ribbons. Mostly for orneryness. For some reason, all our creations ended up having a mean streak. We didn't put anything special in them to make them that way. They just came out like that.

Yeah I dunno which one of you wise guys is responsible but my mechanical bulls got loose and ran wild today. It was like Pamplona. I have to admit I was laughing pretty hard watching you prissy psys climbing up the walls trying to get out of the way, but I knew the Dean would pin it on me as malicious vandalism so I put on my old rodeo clown outfit and tried to maintain some kind of order.

Mechanical bulls are usually perty easy to fool but these had a wild, sparky look in their eyes, and I couldn't stop them when they decided to crash through the floor-to-ceiling windows and into the cafeteria. The Dean is gonna kill me I just know it. But this can't be my third strike--I had nothing to do with it, honest. If I had to guess what got into them I'd say it has something to do with that charged up wuss @Alastor Dimitri. I've heard he's causing all kinds of mayhem bouncing around in the electrical grid.

Now there's a power we could make good use of at Dark 4-H.

Every Wednesday I take the bus over to Sinister Academy because they got a great Dark 4-H program. The four H's of Dark 4-H are as follows:

1) Head
2) Heart
3) Hands
4) Hammer

The first three H's being the location and the order in which you hit your target with the Hammer (#4) in order to incapacitate them and begin your larceny.

Larceny is one of my favorites. I already got my badge.

Next I think I will do Pickpocketing, because it is one of those artisanal skills that are being forgotten in the modern day. Then there's Felony Shoplifting, Extortion, Embezzlement, Criminal Tax Fraud, Bullying, Poisoning, Yelling, Telemarketing... and after that is when you can get the Dark 4-H jacket, which is so cool and really a big part of why I signed up.

See u in the halls.