AVERY
“Okay,” I said, walking around the rubber
tree forest, scratching my head. “Now what?”
I knew that our duty now was to find
the Great Spirit, but where do we even begin? The forest we were in was huge as
it was dense, and me and Jackie were pacing the forest floor until we could actually
see a little rut.
“I have no idea,” Jackie said, and
gave a little sarcastic laugh. “Well, isn’t this just nice,” she said, sighing.
“With all my big talk about finding the Great Spirit, it turns out it was just
a waste of effort, wasn’t it?”
I peered up the four gibbous moons
shining in the night sky; the seven suns that hung in the darkness of the sky
were dark, like light bulbs before someone turned them on. This was one strange
world.
Suddenly, I felt something wrap
itself around my waist, like a thick snake and lift me upside down so that my
hands were dangling about 10
meters above the forest floor, too dazed to scream.
Fortunately, I didn’t have to as Jackie did all the screaming for me.
“Great lord of Mercury!!” she yelped,
her eyes wide in fear. A thick green vine with a small layer of fuzz around its
skin had coiled itself around my waist and was lifting me higher and higher
into the sky, and that was when I screamed louder than I ever did in my life when
I caught sight of what the vine was dragging me to;
The vine belonged to a huge tree
which was as wide as it was tall. At the tip of each branch vines exploded from
every direction, stretching themselves to the forest floor to grab more living
creatures to swallow. At the top of the tree, there was a huge monster plant
that resembled the piranha plant in Super Mario Bros.
It opened it’s huge gaping mouth as I veered
nearer and nearer to it. I heard Jackie scream, but I couldn’t tell if she
really screamed as I was screaming too hard myself to hear. My arms and legs
flailed in all directions when the vine that held me in its steely grip dropped
me into the monster’s mouth and into the darkness of its throat.
JACKIE
As I saw Avery about to get swallowed
by that monstrosity of a plant, I knew I just couldn’t stay and scream; I had
to find a way to help her. I dropped my rucksack to the floor and began
rummaging through it, searching for something-anything!-that might help me
rescue her.
After looking inside for some time, I
found a mini pocket knife I took from my mother’s office desk, but my plan all
focused on whether my aim and throw is as good as I hoped it was. I held my
breath, and with my heart in my throat, flung the sharp blade towards the vine
that held Avery fast.
The monster plant screeched as the
blade penetrated its skin, loosening her grip of Avery just the slightest bit,
but not enough to make it loose its grip on her. She continued to scream and
flail her arms about in fear.
I didn’t know what to do next. I
didn’t have anything else left in my rucksack to help her, just useless stuff
like magazines and comics (and right now I’m thinking: “Why the HECK did I even
bring those?) I closed my eyes, not about to let my best friend die but didn’t
know what to do either.
Oh, how I wish I had a bow. I was
way up at the top in archery class, but unfortunately I didn’t own a bow so I
couldn’t bring one to the quest for searching for the Great Spirit. Thinking of
a bow made me feel stronger suddenly, and I felt like I really was holding a
solid bow in my hands. Without opening my eyes, I aimed my bow to the sky and
where Avery was held captive, and released my grip on the string.
The nest thing I knew was the
plant shrieking so loudly that I was forced to open my eyes out of shock, and
immediately realized I was holding a bow in my hands. Where did that come from?
And where did I get the arrow to fire?
Pushing these thoughts from my
mind, I dropped my weapon gazed up into the sky, watching Avery fall from the
plant’s steely grip and drop with a loud thunk
on the ground next to me. Disoriented, she got up groggily and stared up at me,
lowering her gaze until her eyes fell on the bow on the floor.
“Wow,” she breathed her gaze still
on the bow. “How the heck did you do that, Jackie?” I shrugged, saying that:
“I’m not very sure either.” I gazed up at plant, still moaning in pain, its
millions of vines flailing in every direction, dropping the living creatures
they held captive. Every living thing that dropped from the plants grip
chattered slightly and scurried off into the forest.
“That was wicked, girl,” Avery said,
grinning, but before I could grin back she clutched her back, her face etched
with pain. “Whoa,” I said, my eyes wide. “Did the vine break your spine or
something?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she
grunted, feeling the forest floor for something. “I think I just sat on
something, and wow, is it giving me a bruise.” Soon afterwards Avery managed to
draw out a small device she was sitting on in the shape of a pyramid. It was
purple in color except for a rim of gold lining all around the edges.
“Ouch,” I said, jokingly. “You
sure sat on something, girl. I’m surprised it didn’t poke a hole in your back,
with the spiky tip of that pyramid.” She just glared at me.
“It has static,” she said, and pushed
it in front of my face. “Here. Feel it.” I took it from her, and as soon as my
skin touched the smooth, marble edges of the pyramid a short static shock
entered my body. “Wow,” I said, flipping the pyramid this way and that as I
examined it. “Nice. What is it?”
“I dunno, but it looks pretty
old,” Avery said, reaching out to take it back. She was right. Moss grew from
some places while fungi grew from the other. Whatever this thing was, it was
left here for who knew how long already.
“Hey look!!” Avery said, pointing at
something on the pyramid. And peered over at it, and immediately saw a gold
button at where Avery’s finger was pointing to. “It’s a button! I wonder what
it does.”
We pondered over this idea for awhile,
curious at what it might do, yet thought that it might release a crazy beast
that would eat us up in one gulp or something horrible like that. We had to
options; to press it or not to press it.
Unfortunately, curiosity got the
better of me and I pressed the button before I said anything to Avery. She
gasped: “JACKIE!!! What have you done?” Luckily for us, it didn’t do anything
but release a 3-D hologram of a girl that resembled Samantha, only much older.
Static fuzzed over what she was saying.
“Mer-phhhhft-des, I am
wonder-phfft-you’ll get this-phfffffftt. I cannot he-phhhhhhffffft, but I can
tell you this; the Great Spi-phhhhfffftttt- ruins. If you
don’t-phhhhhfffftttt-where the ruins are, then I shall-phhhffft-map. Thank-phft-you.”
That was all it said before the
hologram dissipated and a map of the forest we were in shot out from where the
hologram was standing just moments ago, a little red arrow pointing to
somewhere in the map. Me and Avery stared at it in wonder.
“I wonder what that was about,”
Avery said, her gaze focused on the little arrow pointing towards a small plain
in the map where the forest ended. “Was it some sort of message for Mercedes?”
“Maybe,” I said, not taking my
eyes off the little map. “But that doesn’t matter now. What matters is that we
have a map right to the Great Spirit!!” I squealed, and jumped up and down.
“Didn’t you hear the hologram? It said: ‘the Great Spirit is in the ruins!’”
“We don’t know that,” Avery
said, bursting my bubble and sending me down to earth. “There was static, so
all we heard was ‘Great Spi’, and ‘ruins’.”
“Don’t be such a grouch,
Avery,” I said, excited. “It definitely means that the Great Spirit is
somewhere in these ‘ruins’!” And Avery sighed, putting her head in her hand.
“Yeah, sure,” she said sarcastically. “Unless it really said: ‘The Great Spirit
is not in the ruins.’”
I slapped Avery playfully on
the shoulder, but a nagging feeling in the pit of my stomach worried over what
Avery just said. Perhaps it was true? Perhaps the ruins were some sort of
terrible, scary place with devils and demons and creatures of the afterworld?
And what if the massage really said: “The Great Spirit is in (somewhere).
Whatever you do, don’t go to the ruins.”
I pushed these thoughts out of
my head. In this quest, we couldn’t afford to not take risks. I mean, suppose
the Great Spirit really was in the ruins and we didn’t go? That would be a
waste of good information!
Avery still had the little
pyramid wrapped in her hands, the hologram of the map still floating atop the
tip of the pyramid, the little arrow jabbing its tip into the plains, like a
finger saying: “Come, come!!”
“This isn’t going to work out,”
She sighed, her grip tightening around the pyramid in her hands. “We don’t even
now where we are in this map. How are we going to go to the ruins this way?”
As if it heard her, the hologram
of the map fuzzed a bit and when the image cleared, there was a great big red
dot in the middle of the forest, signaling where we were standing. Me and Avery
looked at it and then at each other in delight. We had found the path to our
goal, the Great Spirit.
No comments:
Post a Comment