Opening lays out groundwork; what mice are, how she reacts to them. Builds in expectation that newspaper-mouse is leading her towards something as opposed to just showing her the ‘better’ choice.

Then she’s driving down road at night, newspaper-mouse shows up and gets her to pull onto a side road and then a little later on gets her to pull over to the side of the road.

She pulls over, gets out of car, but sees nothing. She is about to get back in the car when she notices movement a little ways into the woods. She climbs down the minihill and heads into the forest.

Scene from before with the two sets of mice and the hurt person, where the choice isn’t a choice. She wants to call an ambulance and wait but he pushes her to get him into the car and get out of there.

She does, and along the way they talk about the ‘luck mice’. His mice seem to be much more proactive (like newspaper-mouse) than her mice. Turns out someone is hunting him which is why he didn’t want to stay.

They get him in the car and she heads out to the hospital, but the mice insist on going another direction. She’s unsure, but he pushes her to listen to them and she does. The man is seriously injured, but not in a fatal or soon-to-be-fatal way. They do still need to get him to a doctor soon and she’s getting nervous about following the mice.

The mice lead them to a house in a pseudo-suburban area (more room between the houses, but still a heavily habited area) that looks completely normal. She leaves him in the car to go ring the doorbell and before she can the door opens and a slightly nervously looking person ushers her inside.

She points out that the man is still in the car, which this fella didn’t know. He was expecting her to be the person the mice were warning him was coming. He helps her get the injured man out of the car and them move him into the living room. Then he has her move the car to another street and walk back to the house.

Actually he wants her to go home and forget she’d ever met them, but newspaper-mouse is very insistent that she stay.

It turns out that all three of them are on the same side, although none of them had met before. Someone is hunting mice-folk in the area and no one is sure why. The homeowner is assuming it’s someone looking to ‘collect’ the mice, since one mouse-folk can ‘win’ the mice from another mouse-folk. It very rarely happens since no one knows it’s possible, and most often only happens by accident.

The new guy actually refers to his mice as birds, and they do seem to be more of a flying mouse than the other two mouse-folks. There is some discussion as to what the mice are, but none of them have a clue and apparently no one else knows either.

The two find out from the guy that owns the house that there are also folks who actively pursue mice-folk in order to use them as human canaries. The only reason the lady had never run into them is because she’d never told anyone about the mice since she’s had a bad reaction from a playmate when she was little.

Most people talk about the mice at some point, which is how the other people track them down. While no one else can see the mice, it’s pretty easy to figure out that their ‘luck’ is improbably consistent.

But since there are three of them now, they plan a trap for the person hunting the hurt guy. They know he’ll show up at the house at some point. If he’s someone looking to ‘win’ more mice, they should be able to take him down since they outnumber him and if it’s a mafia person, they should be able to keep him/them busy until the cops arrive.

Much easier to prove to the cops that the mobsters are out to get you than the ‘nice normal person’ with no motive. (figures)