This sort of thing continued over the next few days. However, it seemed to cause a bit of tension between the guys. This time they were arguing about the Toy's learning rate. They were soon interrupted by the Toy, who said he needed the List.

"No, you don't." I told him.

"Yes I do. It says here I need to check it twice."

"Santa already checked it." Bernard told him.

"No I didn't."

"The real one." I corrected.

"I am the real one."

"I'm sorry?" I asked, not sure if I heard that right.

"I'm in charge here."

"What?" Bernard and I asked at the same time.

"It says I need to. That's the rule. I like rules. You know how I feel about that."

"I think there's been a misunderstanding." I say.

"No, I'm the rulemaker. I thought I explained this to you."

"I have an idea! How about we have some fun?" Curtis says, breaking the argument and changing the subject.

That's when we noticed Joey and his football group practicing. We encouraged the Toy to go play with him and explained the basics of how to play Tinsel Football. While he did enjoy it, he tackled one of them, smacked the others with the football, and chased Joey for a bit. We had no idea where they ran off to, but Joey eventually returned and I apologised to all of them about that, giving another terrible excuse to keep up our lie.

We then looked through the workshop to find the Toy, and saw him at the Naughty/Nice Center.

"This can't be good." I say as we went over to him.

"What's going on here?" Bernard asks.

"Well, I'm checking the Naughty/Nice List. actually, I'm checking it twice."

"We already told you it's been checked. Don't worry about it."

"Well I do worry about it. There's a lot of mistakes here." The Toy then gave an example about a kid from Denmark who's on the Nice List, even though he does some minor not-so-nice things.

"We try to cut most of them a little bit of slack this time of year." Curtis explains.

"I don't understand that." The Toy says before giving more examples that I thought were a bit ridiculous.

"But they're just kids." Bernard reasons. "Everyone misbehaves sometime."

"According to the Handbook, naughty kids get coal in their stockings. If they don't have any, we won't make them stockings. In my opinion, I think they should all get coal in their stockings, don't you?" The Toy explains, giving his last question to the elf holding the Handbook for him.

"That's not how it works!" I say, but he ignored us and wandered off. "We need to go get Scott," I tell them, "it's taking things too literally. If we wait any longer, this could get out of control."

"And if we interrupt something important?" Curtis asks, "We can handle this ourselves until he gets back."

"And if things get worse?"

"They won't. We can fix this."

I let out an annoyed sigh, seeing that us arguing wasn't going to help. "Fine, but if things get worse, I'm going to get him."