Grover Snodd and his friends Tim Santora, Carl Barrington, Etienne Cherdlu, and Hogan Slothrop, neighborhood kids from Mingeborough, New York, meet up at Grover's house one Saturday afternoon to discuss activities for the weekend. Their "Inner Junta" talk about planning elaborate practical jokes, collecting milk money from schoolkids. The meeting adjourns and the five of them depart, through a lush section of forest they dub King Yjro's Woods, then down a stream aboard a refurbished flat-bottomed boat they christened the "S.S. Leak", to an abandoned manor known as "The Big House".