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Darktan leads a group to rescue Hamnpork, while Peaches and Dangerous Beans free Keith and Malicia. The rats feel it, and it returns many of them to being simple rats, to the dismay of Dangerous Beans. Maurice hides, and feels a voice trying to enter his mind. The rat-catchers return, and lock Keith and Malicia away, and take Hamnpork to be coursed. The two groups meet in the rat catchers' den, where they have been storing the food the rats are thought to have eaten, and find cages where the rats are being bred, for coursing. While talking to her, Maurice reveals that the rat-catchers have been passing off boot-laces as rat tails (for which they are paid 50 pence each).Īs they set off to look in the rat-catchers' house, the rats discover many rat tunnels, which are empty, save for traps and poison. She soon discovers that Maurice can talk, and meets Sardines, a tap-dancing rat who is the most daring of the group. Maurice and Keith meet Malicia, the mayor's daughter, who is a story teller (her grandmother and great aunt were the Sisters Grim). They are surprised to find that while the buildings are expensively built, the people have little food, and rats are hunted far more viciously than anywhere else. The rats set about planning their offensive, led by Darktan, their general, while Maurice and Keith, the piper, look around. They agree to do one last job, in the town of Bad Blintz, in Überwald. The rats are seeking an ideal world where humans and rats live together, following the example of their sacred book Mr Bunnsy Has an Adventure.
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The group is not completely happy the leader of the rats, Hamnpork, despises Maurice, while Dangerous Beans, a near-blind rat who guides them like a guru, wants to start a rat civilisation and both he and Peaches, the group's scribe, find their trickery unethical. The rats had gained intelligence from eating the waste from the rubbish tip behind Unseen University Maurice gained it after eating one of the rats, Additives before he was capable of realizing that they were no longer proper rats. The Amazing Maurice is a talking cat, who leads his Educated Rodents, a group of talking rats, as they go from town to town being a plague so that their accomplice, a boy piper, can "lure them all away" from the town, after which they share the money the piper makes.
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