CHAPTER 2 - Chapter One

Chapter One

“You find yourself in an abandoned circus midway. Games, food stalls, and sideshow stages sit empty on your left and right, making a corridor that leads into the misty distance. You get the feeling—”

“Are there any of those ‘knock down the milk bottle’ games?” I asked.

Ethan lowered his notes to give me an irritated look. “Sure, I guess.”

“Rhyen goes up to one and throws the ball!”

“Seriously?” he asked with a sigh. “Fine. Roll for luck.”

“Shouldn't it be a skill check?” Jade asked.

Ethan shook his head and pointed at the handbook. “It says here that carnival games are usually rigged, so it would be a luck check.”

“But this is a circus,” I reminded him. “Not a carnival.”

“Okay, fine!” Ethan snapped. “Roll for whatever you want. I don't care!”

“Come on,” I said, shaking the twenty sided die in my fist. “Mama needs a new pair of giant shoes!”

I rolled the die, crossing my fingers as it bounced across the cardboard box we were using as a table, until it came to a stop on…

“Seventeen!” I yelled, pumping my fist. “Does that do it?”

“Yeah, you knock down all the milk bottles,” Ethan said, rolling his eyes. “As you continue down the midway, you get the feeling—”

“Wait! What did I win?”

Ethan lowered the book again. “Henry, it's an abandoned circus. There's nothing to win!”

“Oh, come on! If they left the games set up, then there has to be some prizes left over too, right?”

“Sure, yeah, Ryan—”

“Rhyen.”

“That’s what I said!”

“You spelled it wrong.”

Ethan gripped the player sheets so tightly I thought he was going to rip them in half, and glared at me. “She wins a rotten, moldy teddy bear with a colony of maggots nesting in its stomach. Are you happy?”

“Heck yeah!” I jotted my treasure down on my character sheet. “Score!”

“Now, if you're done derailing the campaign…”

“I wouldn't need to derail it if you didn't railroad us so hard.”

“I am not railroading—” Ethan began, but he was cut off when a gust of wind blasted across the rooftop, whipping our notes up into the air.

“Jalapeno shortcake!” I yelled, springing to my feet and diving for Rhyen's character sheet. I managed to nab it, but four pages of Ethan's campaign flew past me before I could react. Ethan dashed after them, snatching three out of the air and then lunging after the last one—

“Ethan, be careful!” Jade yelled.

Ethan dug in his heels, barely managing to stop before he slid right over the side of the building. He teetered on the edge for a few seconds, his arms windmilling—and then began to fall forward.

No! I thought, dashing toward him. Even before I took one step, I could tell I wasn't going to be able to reach him in time.

But then Jade was there. Appearing almost out of nowhere, she grabbed Ethan's shirt with both hands. For a second it looked like he would drag her down with him, but then she heaved backwards as hard as she could. They both collapsed on of the roof, with Ethan landing on top of Jade.

I immediately felt my face turn blue with jealousy. How come I never got any quality tackle time with Ethan?

“H- Hey,” he said with a shy little smile that made my heart skip a beat even if it wasn't directed at me. “Thanks for that.”

“No problem,” Jade replied, her face turning red.

The two of them locked eyes, and to my horror their faces began to inch toward each other…

“Jade,” I snapped, grabbing Ethan by his collar and pulling him to his feet, “is not a mattress, so quit using her as one and get back to the game!”

For a second it looked like Ethan was about to bite my head off, but then he glanced back at Jade. With a cute little blush, he slapped my hand away and brought the notes back to the box we'd been sitting around a minute ago.

“Can you remind me,” he said, sitting down on the milk crate I'd picked out just for him, “why we're doing this again?”

“Why do you need a reason?” I asked. “Bigtops and Boogeymen is the best game ever made!”

“That's debatable, and also not what I was asking.” He gestured toward the ledge he'd almost fallen off of. “I meant, why are we playing on top of a skyscraper?”

“Because this is the best place for us to get a good view of the city.” I paused, then reached down and turned up the radio we had set up next to the box. “Speaking of which…”

“...at today's 74th Annual Lobstrodamus Parade,” the announcer cheerfully announced, “where we celebrate the day we began using live lobsters as our national currency!”

“I've been living with a family of klaons for almost a year now,” Ethan muttered with a shake of his head, “and this is still the weirdest holiday I've ever heard of.”

“Weirder than Black Friday?” I asked, shuffling my character sheets back into order. “Where people trample each other for new toys less than a day after they get done celebrating being thankful for what they have?”

Ethan opened his mouth to snap at me, then closed it. “Okay, fair enough. Anyway, aren't we supposed to be watching for a maiam?”

“That's exactly what we're doing,” I answered.

“By playing BnB on top of a skyscraper, listening to someone talk about a parade we're not watching?”

I shrugged. “Lobstropolis is a huge place. If you want to try searching all of it, go right ahead. But ninety percent of the city is gathered right here. If the maiam is going to strike, it'll be somewhere nearby. We just have to wait for it to make its move.”

Ethan rolled his eyes. “And you wonder why McGus calls you irresponsible.”

“Actually, I'm wondering why you're talking about that old cabbage fart instead of playing the game.” I snapped my fingers under his nose. “Chop chop, ringmaster!”

“Fine, fine,” Ethan grumbled, slapping my hand away again. “You're making your way down the midway when…”

Only half listening, I glanced over the side of the building, to where a stream of giant balloons were making their way down the street seventy stories below. Most were from shows that only aired here in the Lobstropolis dimension, but I recognized a couple of them, like Jeremy Jeroff, star of the hit cartoon Oops, I Married a Giraffe, and Justin Flinchley, Santa’s Flying Mutant Cervine from the absolutely terrible show I Applied For a Delivery Job and Got Turned Into a Flying Reindeer?!, which somehow kept getting approved for new seasons despite having a rating of negative two hundred.

I hated that show.

“And here comes my personal favorite,” the radio announcer said as a fifty foot lobster wearing a crown and a long white wizard beard drifted past, “Rich Pinch, the World's Richest Lobster! Have you folks ever wondered how that works? Like, is he using his own kids to buy groceries? Or are they…oh, I'm being advised by my producer that I should stop talking now.”

“Henry!”

I looked up at Ethan, whose face told me he was one wrong word away from throwing the entire game off the building, and me along with it.

“What do you do?” he demanded.

“I don't do anything,” I said smoothly, desperately trying to remember what he had just said. I liked BnB, I really did, but you try paying attention when there's a floating lobster kaiju passing underneath you. “Rhyen, however…”

Ethan raised his eyebrows expectantly.

“She…”

Gizzard flavored frozen yogurt, why couldn't I pay attention for more than…was it just me, or was there a pigeon nesting in Rich Pinch’s armpit?

“She, uh, pulls out her trusty warhammer, Splartacus, and attacks the…thing,” I said in as proud a declaration as I could hesitantly declare. Taking the die, I gave it another roll, then uppercut the air in front of me. “Natural twenty! What do you think of that, mothercrumpets?”

Ethan and Jade both gave me a flat look.

“Henry, it was your idea to play this while we waited,” said Jade. “If you're not going to pay attention—”

“I'm totally paying attention!” I shot back.

“Really?” Ethan asked.

“Yes, really!”

“Then would you care to explain why you just killed Yin?”

I blinked. “Say what?”

“I found a flaming seltzer bottle,” Jade said, rolling her eyes. “I was trying to give it to you, and you killed me for it.”

“Ah…right…” I said slowly, my little blue brain doing its best to come up with a valid fictional excuse. Yin was the name of Jade's character (was being the key word here) and I was playing a Hobo named Rhyen. “Clearly I was trying to…”

Luckily, I was spared from having to do any more of the dreaded thinking by Mr. Radio Announcer.

“Hey, that looks like a new balloon, ladies and gentlemen! Funny, I don't see it in any of my notes. Does anybody know what it's from? Well, whoever he is, he sure is ugly! I bet more than a few kids are going to be seeing that in their nightmares tonight.”

I perked up, darting to look over the side of the building just as a big black and white thing came floating around the corner.

“Wait a minute,” the announcer said. “Is anyone controlling that balloon?”

I drew the ping pong paddle from my belt and extended her into warhammer form. “Time to get to work, guys!”

Ethan and Jade were beside me a second later. Screams were beginning to echo up to us from the street.

“How are we going to get down there?” Ethan asked.

I hooked my arm around his. “Tally…”

He looked at me in confusion, and then his eyes widened. “No, no, no, n—”

I jumped over the edge, taking him with me.

“HOOOOOOOOO!”

CHAPTER 3 - Chapter Two

Chapter Two

The wind roared in my ears as I plummeted toward the street from the skyscraper’s seventieth floor. It sounded like adventure, action, excitement—and was almost completely drowned out by Ethan’s shrill, girly scream.

As we fell, I turned to study the maiam. It was easily the biggest I had ever faced, close to sixty feet long and thirty feet wide. It had a big, round torso, stubby arms and legs, and a face that was ninety percent mouth, nine percent bulbous nose, and one percent black, beady eyes. And, like all maiams, it was as vibrantly colorful as a penguin on an old timey television. Despite its size, it hovered over the street like a gigantic balloon, periodically bobbing up and down to try and snatch a victim. Luckily, the crowd below panicked and scattered, moving too quickly for it to catch them with its big, fat sausage fingers. Still, it was only a matter of time before some poor sap didn’t manage to get out of the way in time.

Already, my mind was racing, formulating a dozen different ways that we could take this monster—

“WE’RE GONNA DIIIIEEEEE!” Ethan shrieked, derailing my train of thought into a metaphorical volcano.

“Thanks a lot,” I snapped, turning to glare at him. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to think when I’m falling at a hundred miles per hour?”

I don’t think he heard me over the sound of his own shrieking. I rolled my eyes. Had he even bothered to look down?

Half a second later, we landed on something big, soft, and rubbery. Sinking down into it a bit, we were abruptly shot a few feet back up into the air before coming down a second time and bouncing gently to a stop on Rich Pinch, the World’s Richest Lobster’s forehead.

“We- We- We- We…” Ethan stammered. I took a closer look at him. Was it just me, or had the white streak Con put in his hair grown a couple inches? “We’re alive?”

About fifty feet away, the balloon maiam froze. It raised its nose to the air, sniffing for something—and then its eyes zeroed in on Ethan and the massive stockpile of laughter he had inside him.

“For now,” I said, bouncing to my feet with Splatsy in my hands. “Try to stay that way for a while longer, okay?”

I jumped, Rich Pinch bouncing me higher and higher every time I came down. It was like being in a bounce house, except there was no roof, and we were about fifty feet in the air. Finally, I charged my shoes with magic and launched myself off of Rich Pinch, flying towards the maiam at roughly the speed of light. I raised Splatsy, ready to rain on this maiam’s parade.

I swung, hitting the maiam square between the eyes—and Splatsy bounced right off of it, sending me flying back the way I’d come. I hit Rich Pinch’s crown, which rebounded me down onto his forehead beside Ethan.

“What did you think was going to happen?” he demanded.

A flash of green light marked Jade’s arrival. “You don’t pop balloons with blunt objects, Henry.”

“Obviously,” I snapped, scrambling back to my feet. “But my first strike has to be with Splatsy. It’s an ancient Hunter tradition, so could you maybe get off my back about it?”

Ethan rolled his eyes, and I considered starting another ancient tradition of braining sarcastic dweebs when they don’t show Hunters the proper respect.

“Anyway, this is good,” I said as the maiam began to drift closer. “This means I finally get to try out my new toys!”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Jade asked, taking a wary step back.

“Nope!”

Shrinking Splatsy down and hanging her from my belt, I took a quick puff from my inhaler to top off my laughter, and then boinged off of Rich Pinch again. This time as I was flying through the air, I drew the two Prankles cans that I had holstered on my hips. They were a pair of cardboard tubes, each ten inches long, but instead of being filled with deliciously unhealthy potato chips, they had a surprise waiting inside.

I charged them with magic, pointing them at the maiam, and then released. A pair of glowing blue spring-snakes blasted out of them. The burst sent me flying backwards again, but the snakes streaked across the sky to hit the maiam right in its ugly face, where they exploded into blue light.

The maiam roared in pain, reaching for its face, but its stubby arms weren’t long enough. A pair of bright red burns marred the skin on its forehead, making for the only splashes of color anywhere on its body. It turned to me with a betrayed look in its eyes, clearly wondering why I was doing this when all it wanted to do was kill and eat as many innocent people’s laughter as it could. With another cry, it began to float upwards where I couldn’t reach it.

Or so it thought.

Holstering the Prankles cans again—I’d named them Prinkle and Prunkle—I drew the second new addition to my arsenal: a giant sticky hand. It was just like the kind you could buy with tickets at an arcade, except about a hundred times bigger, and a thousand times more awesome. I twirled it above my head a couple times, and then let it fly. The gooey, rubber rope shot down the street, right over Rich Pinch’s head, and grabbed hold of the side of a building. I felt the line go taut, and was yanked after it at a blinding speed.

I grabbed Ethan off of Rich Pinch as I sped past.

“Are you trying to give me whiplash?” he demanded.

“There are so many easier ways I could kill you than that!” I answered. “Ready for some action?”

Ethan drew his crystal spellhammer, and I grinned.

“Hold on, then!” I told him. A quick tug unstuck the sticky hand—his name was Globber—and back onto my belt he went. We were right underneath the maiam now, so I drew Prinkle and Prunkle again. I had six more spring-snakes to load them with, but for now I left them empty. Pointing them toward the ground, I filled them with magic, and released. Nothing came out of them except a flash of blue light, but the force of the blast sent me and Ethan shooting upwards.

“Twentieth floor,” I said as we flew past the maiam. It gave us a surprised look. “Ladies’ wear, sporting goods, and butt kicking!”

I spun in midair, throwing Ethan onto the maiam’s back. Just like when we'd landed on Rich Pinch, Ethan bounced a few times before landing with all the grace of a goldfish having a seizure. There was another flash of green light, and Jade reappeared to help him to his feet. Meanwhile, the momentum from my blast finally ran out, and I began to fall again. Throwing Globber, I globbed him onto the side of a nearby building. His rope stretched as I fell, and I gradually came to a stop before shooting back up again like a rocket-powered bungee jumper. Globber un-globbed from the building, and I angled myself to land next to Ethan.

“What do we do now?” Ethan asked as I touched down on the maiam’s back with a landing that an Olympic gymnast would have envied—before I bounced into the air again, flew in an arc over Ethan's head, and landed on my butt a few feet away.

The maiam roared, trying to crane its neck around to see what the chicken fried rice we were doing back there. When it couldn't twist around far enough to see us, it opted to roll over instead.

“We run!” Jade yelled as the gargantuan gasbag started rotating in midair.

Together, the three of us broke into a sprint, heading for the maiam's side as quickly as we could. But its body was smooth and slick like…well, like a balloon, and the angle was getting steeper by the second. Grabbing Ethan's hand again, I whipped out Globber and flung him toward the maiam’s outstretched arm. He globbed onto the tip of one of its fingers, and I jumped, taking Ethan with me. Together, we swung across the gap between skyscrapers.

“Aaaaaaaahhhh!” Ethan screamed into my ear.

“That is the worst Tarzan yell I've ever heard!” I scolded him.

He pointed in front of us, and my head snapped around to see the maiam opening its mouth—while we sped right toward it!

“Ethan!” I yelled. “Pacification Protocol Ten!”

Ethan thrust his spellhammer out in front of him, which was glowing with a bright white light, and yelled, “Cogito et creo!”

A gigantic pacifier made of flames appeared in the air in front of us. It flew forward, straight into the maiam’s mouth, and a smell that reminded me of Uncle Junk’s shop whenever it caught fire filled the air. The maiam tried to cry out, but was successfully silenced by the giant flaming binky. It thrashed in pain, flinging me and Ethan higher up into the air.

“Nice one!” I told Ethan, un-globbing Globber. We began to fall back down toward the maiam again.

“What the hell is Pacification Protocol Ten?” he demanded.

“It’s when you stuff a giant flaming pacifier in the maiam’s mouth. Duh!”

“I only did that because you said the word pacify, Henry! What if I hadn't I hadn't been able to think of anything?”

“I knew you would. You always do!”

Ethan looked like he wanted to complain more, but luckily we landed on the maiam before he could. It had fully flipped over by now, putting us on its fat, gas-filled belly. The deadly pacifier had disappeared—Ethan has to concentrate to keep his spells active—but it sported a bunch of nasty looking burns all over its face now.

“Right,” I said, taking another puff from my inhaler. “This is getting old. Time to burst this guy’s bubble!”

Did you like that? I've been working on my cool one liners.

Drawing Splatsy again, I began to bounce on the maiam’s stomach, going higher with every bounce.

“Henry,” Ethan yelled after me, “you've already tried that! It doesn't work!”

“Sure it does!” I yelled back. “I just need…”

Boing!

“...to get a little more power…”

Boing!

“...behind it!”

And with that, I pulled out the third and final addition to my arsenal: my joy buzzer, Spazzy Basil. Using a little bit of magic, I stuck him onto Splatsy, merging them so as to unlock their ultimate final form: Splatzztsy! Don’t ask me how to pronounce that, because I’m pretty sure it’s not physically possible if you don’t have at least three tongues.

With my weapon suitably powered up to anime levels, I began channeling as much magic into Splatzztsy as I could. Spazzy Basil sucked up all of it, and bolts of lightning began to arc out of him with an ominous crackle. I bounced one more time, flying fifty feet up into the air, and raised Splatzztsy over my head.

“Shocking news!” I yelled. “Lobstrodamus Parade canceled due to unexpected lightning storm!”

Hey, I said I was working on my one liners, not that I’d perfected them.

I threw Splatzztsy as hard as I could, and she became a blur of brown and blue as she streaked through the air to slam right into the maiam’s nose. It howled in pain as electricity began to zigzag across its face…

Before Splatzztsy bounced right back and came flying toward me.

“Oh, pickles and—” I muttered just before she hit me square in the face.

Everything went dark.

The next thing I knew, I was opening my eyes, and my skull was wracked with pain. Splatzztsy was falling right beside me, giving me a look as if this had been my fault. At least she had used up all of her electricity on the maiam before deciding to wallop me.

“You,” I said, folding my arms, “are not pulling your weight in this relationship.”

Grabbing her out of the air, I pulled out Globber with my other hand, globbing him to the wall just in time to slow my descent before I made a Henry-shaped hole in the abandoned street below. As soon as my feet were on solid ground, I looked back upwards. Gasbag was still up there, almost level with the top of the skyscraper we had been on before this whole fiasco started. I could see flashes of light, which I took to mean Ethan was fending off the maiam on his own. I needed to get back up there. But first, I needed to come up with a plan.

Trust Henry Rider to bring a hammer to a balloon fight, the annoyingly logical voice in my head said, and I promptly slapped myself to make it shut up. That only reminded me of how badly Splatzztsy had messed up my face, though, so I pulled out my inhaler and took a good, long pull from my inhaler. The laughter inside—thank you, Grandpa Teddy!—immediately set to work putting my face back together. About half a minute later, the pain vanished, and I sighed in relief.

Then my foot lit up with pain.

“Oh, come on!” I yelled, kicking out at whatever had pinched me. A lobster went flying away to land in the street, its claws clicking threateningly. There were about a dozen of them crawling around, having escaped from a nearby float that had been tossing them to the crowd like candy. Ethan was right, I decided. Lobstrodamus was a stupid…

Claws!

A lightbulb turned on in my head. Running into the street, I grabbed two lobsters off the ground, and then whipped Globber back up into the air. He latched onto a building above me, launching me—and my two new lobster friends—up into the sky. I had to launch myself another two more times, but soon I was hundreds of feet above the ground again, and rapidly approaching the maiam.

“Hey, you overgrown bag of farts!” I yelled, streaking past its face. “You miss me?”

It turned to growl at me, and I winced. Splatzztsy hadn’t managed to pop it, but she had messed up its face even worse than mine. It reached one of its stumpy arms towards me, but one more swing from Globber put me back on his stomach alongside my friends.

“About time you got back!” Ethan snapped before blasting a beam of energy from his spellhammer. It mostly fizzled out before hitting the maiam—he’d been training with McGus for almost a year, but learning magic took a long time—but it still managed to give Gasbag a painful looking sunburn.

“We were worried,” Jade said, flashing over to stand beside me. “Ethan almost jumped off the maiam after you.”

I looked at her, my eyes going wide and my face turning blue. “He did? That’s so sweet of him! So…why didn’t he?”

“Because I stopped him.”

The butterflies in my stomach disappeared, and I began weighing the pros and cons of throwing her off the maiam. Before I could come to a decision, though, a shadow blocked out the sun, and I looked up to see one of the maiam’s hands descending toward us.

“Broccoli quesadillas,” I spat, and dove to tackle Ethan. We went rolling across the maiam’s belly, perhaps not as romantically as I would have liked but I’ll take what I can get. Jade didn’t even bother trying to dodge it, and her body was crushed beneath its gray, flabby palm with a flash of green light. A ripple spread out from its hand, throwing me and Ethan up into the air yet again when it reached us.

“JADE!” Ethan yelled, stretching his hand out toward where she’d just been.

“Oh, relax!” I snapped. I had just saved his life for the forty millionth time, and all he cared about was her. “She’s fine and you know it!”

“It’s the thought that counts,” Jade said, reappearing next to us with another green flash. She leaned over and gave Ethan a kiss on the cheek even as we kept flying upwards.

I glared at them, but of course neither of them noticed. I really needed to kill something. Luckily, I had come equipped to do just that.

Pulling out my two lobster buddies—I bet they would never steal the boy I loved from me—I quickly loaded them into Prinkle and Prunkle. Then, charging the twin Prankles cans with magic, I aimed them straight down at Gasbag’s still-jiggling belly, and fired!

The two magically charged lobsters flashed through the sky, their glowing, razor-sharp claws ripping straight through the maiam’s rubbery skin. Gasbag gave one final howl of anguish before it was sent rocketing across the city, all of its gas spewing out through the holes with a loud THBBBBBBT!

A few seconds later, it vanished, its body dissolving to nothing but bad memories and the lingering smell of unholy flatulence.

“There,” I said, holstering Prinkle and Prunkle and dusting my hands off. “Another job well done!”

“Uh, Henry?” Ethan said. “Good job and all that, but do you think you could…”

We began to fall.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, digging the Escher Cube out of my pocket. “Hold on.”

I turned the Cube’s sides like the ancient stone Rubik’s Cube it resembled. We kept falling, but reality around us began to shift and slide to match the movements of the Cube.

“A little faster, Henry!” Ethan yelled as we rapidly approached the ground. Now that the maiam was gone, a small crowd was beginning to form in the streets to see what had happened.

“Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right,” I muttered to myself.

“HENRY!”

“And there we go!” I declared, snapping the last row into place. I gave the crowd, now less than twenty feet below us, a cheerful wave. “Happy Lobstrodamus!”

Then we all vanished in a burst of white light.

CHAPTER 4 - Chapter Three

Chapter Three

Reality snapped back into place around us, and we all landed in a heap on top of each other.

“You know that shouldn't be possible,” Ethan complained as he picked himself up, “right?”

“What shouldn't?” I asked. He extended his hand, and I reached out to take it, only for him to Jade to her feet and leave me lying on the cold, hard pavement.

“We were falling when the Escher Cube warped us out of Lobstropolis,” he answered. “And we were still falling when we appeared here.”

“So?” I snapped, getting to my feet all by my lonely self.

“So, if we never stopped falling, then the momentum of our fall never went away, which means that we still should have died even though we landed in a different dimension!”

I paused, looking at him with an eyebrow raised.

“What?” he asked.

I shook my head. “You are such a nerd.”

“You should be glad he thinks about things like that,” Jade said. She took his hand, their fingers intertwining, and I looked away sharply before they could see my cheeks turning blue. “If you keep leaping into every situation without looking, there’s no telling where you’ll eventually land.”

“Speaking of which,” Ethan added, looking around, “where did you bring us?”

We were in an alleyway, but the buildings that surrounded us were too small to still be in Lobstropolis, where every skyscraper reached for the stars like giant lobster claws determined to pinch the sun. The sound of music drifted over to us from somewhere nearby, and I followed its toe-tapping trail to lead Ethan and Jade out into the streets of Mauldibamm.

I stepped out into the city's vibrant atmosphere, and sighed quietly in relief when I felt some of the tension in my chest unknot itself. This was the klaon capital, a place built just for people like me. Strings of colored lights made intricate, flowing webs between the buildings, like laughter carried on a breeze. Store windows advertised things like Aunt Archibald's Heat Seeking Pies, luxury giant shoes that got eighty miles per gallon, and the newest N.O.S.E. model that came preloaded with camel, moose, and capybara settings. At an intersection a little ways off, a parade of klaons dressed as bananas were goose-stepping down the road for no other reason than because they could.

I loved this place.

“And what exactly are we doing here?” Ethan asked.

“I'm going to do something I should have done months ago.”

“Right. Because that isn't ominous at all.”

I turned and set off toward the center of town. In the distance stood a hill tall enough to look out over all of Mauldibamm, and on top of that was a huge circular building with a conical roof that had been painted with red and white stripes to look like a circus cent. That was the Grand Lark, where the Council of Shnoob met every day to think of new and interesting ways to boss me around. They were also in charge of running Mauldibamm and governing the klaon population that was spread out across the various, infinite dimensions, but trust me, most of their energy was dedicated to bossing me around.

“Henry,” Jade said, following after me, “talk to us!”

“All of my problems are being caused by two people: Ichabod Hench, and Legion,” I finally answered. “Ichabod is building laughter farms where he uses mind control to force people to laugh themselves to death. One day, that moldy meatloaf’s mind control spell goes haywire, and creates Legion. Now Legion is royally cheesed off with my entire race and won't stop until—”

“Yeah, we know all of that already,” Ethan interrupted me. “But that doesn't explain why you brought us here.”

We reached the top of the hill, and I paused. We were in the Grand Lark's rear parking lot, where the councilmembers who lived in Mauldibamm parked their cars. The biggest one was Ichabod's, a Humvee about as big as a Volkswagen Beetle. Compared to the cars parked beside it, though, it practically was the size of a Humvee. Ichabod was a firm believer in Bigger Is Better, and he never passed up an opportunity to prove it. Each car contained its own pocket dimension, making them as spacious as a bus on the inside, while only needing a tenth of the gas that a normal car would have needed.

“Isn't it obvious?” I asked. “I'm going to end this.”

Ethan and Jade fell silent, sharing a worried look. I ignored them, focusing on the Grand Lark. Ichabod and Legion were both in there. Ichabod was representative for the Reds on the council, and Legion was possessing Victoria Verde, representative for the Greens. Just thinking about it made my hands itch to draw Splatsy. I resisted, though. As satisfying as it would be to turn their heads two dimensional, it wouldn't actually solve any of my problems. If I wanted to do this, I would need a plan with a little more bang than that.

“And how exactly are you planning to do that?” Ethan asked nervously.

“With this!”

Reaching under my shirt, I pulled out a thin red tube. It was about a foot long, a little thicker than my thumb, and had a long black string coming out of one end.

“Henry!” Jade exclaimed with a horrified gasp. “Tell me that isn't what I think it is!”

“It most certainly is!” I declared. “Barnaby McBoomboom’s Time Stopper Party Popper! Guaranteed to stop time around you for up to thirty minutes so the party will never end!”

Ethan and Jade both sighed in relief.

“What?” I asked. “What did you think it was?"

“Never mind,” Ethan said in that don't-give-her-any-ideas tone he occasionally used on a daily basis. “Henry, how is a party trick going to solve anything?”

“Through the power of creative thinking!” I pointed the popper at the back door, then turned around to face Ethan and Jade again. “At exactly eight o’clock-ish tonight, Legion will walk out through that door, and I'll be waiting here to hit him right between the eyes with the highest quality prank my allowance can buy.”

“And what is that going to do, besides make him mad?” Jade asked.

I rolled my eyes. “Obviously, if I can take him by surprise, anything that lunatic says is practically going to be a confession! And in the end, what we both want is to shut down the laughter farms. Once the jig is up, do you really think he won’t take the opportunity to slam the door of justice on Ichabod’s guilty red fingers?”

Ethan squinted at me. “None of what you just said made any sense at all.”

“On the contrary, my dear Watson,” I countered, poking him in the nose and making him slap my hand away, “it makes all of the sense!”

“You think that after all the work he’s done, he’s just going to come clean? Doesn’t that seem a little too, you know, easy?”

“I don’t intend to give him the choice,” I insisted. “You guys have to understand by now that I’m the only one taking this seriously! If I leave it for the council to take care of, who knows how many more people will die before they act? If they ever act?”

Ethan held up a hand. “Henry—”

“But nothing!” I cut him off. “I’m ending this today!”

“Henry!”

“Don't interrupt me! If you two are too scared to help, then you can go hide behind those bushes and…do whatever mushy stuff boyfriends and girlfriends do.”

“HENRY!”

I glared at him. “WHAT?”

“Turn around!”

I blinked, and then my eyes widened when I realized neither him nor Jade were looking at me.

So I turned around.

“Hello, granddaughter,” said Grandpa Teddy, a look of supreme disappointment on his face. “And what might you be up to this fine evening?”

My eye twitched, and I forced my mouth into a rictus grin. “Oh, you know, it's such a fine evening that Ethan, Jade, and I decided to come up here and enjoy the view.”

“And what is—”

“I mean, isn't Mauldibamm beautiful when the sun sets?” I turned around and looked out across the city. “We decided to come up here, since it's the best view in town!”

What was he doing here? I snuck a glance at my watch, but it was only seven fifteen. The Council of Shnoob shouldn't have adjourned for another forty five minutes!

“What's that in your—”

“Because that's what we like doing!” Sweat was pouring down my brow now. “Appreciating the beauty of the natural world, living our very best lives, right here in the moment without a single cell phone in sight! You know, things old people like you enjoy!”

“Henry, what are you holding—”

“Anyway, what are you doing out here, Grandpa Teddy?” I asked, spinning back around to face him. “Did the council decide to close early today? Are you finally cashing in some well-earned PTO? Is Le…I mean, Victoria going to be out soon?”

But Grandpa Teddy was sharper than he looked, and he managed to see through the masterful web of lies I had spun. “I'm here because someone reported three suspicious figures lurking around the back entrance of the Grand Lark. Now, what is—”

I grinned at him. “And you decided to come and check it out yourself instead of leaving it to Ombo and Clombo? Way to take initiative, Grandpa T! Up high!”

I raised my hand for a high five—and the party popper fell out of it and rolled to a stop at his feet. He looked down at it, and then back up at me.

“Come on,” I said, my voice weirdly high pitched. “Don't leave me hanging here!”

He left me hanging and picked up the party popper.

“Care to explain what this is, Henry?” he asked.

“A bomb.”

Behind me, I heard Ethan slap his forehead.

Grandpa Teddy’s expression darkened. “This isn’t a joke, Henry. Do you have any idea what this is?”

I sighed. “It’s just a prank, Grandpa!”

“A prank that you were planning to weaponize against a member of the Council of Shnoob!”

“No, not against the council!” I argued, my face turning blue as the same argument we’d had a hundred times before began yet again. “I was only going to use it against—”

“Stop!” Grandpa Teddy held up his hand and closed his eyes. Suddenly, he looked about eighty years older, and very, very tired. “Just stop. Please.”

A pit formed in my stomach. “Grandpa…”

He shook his head. “You’ve gone too far this time, Henry. You’ve always had a penchant for causing trouble, but this? Threatening the council? Do you have any idea what would have happened if anyone besides me had caught you out here?”

Looking at him, all stern-faced and disapproving, I felt ten months’ worth of anger and frustration bubbling up inside me, and…

“If anyone else had found me,” I blurted out before I could stop myself, “then maybe they would freaking listen to me, unlike my grandpa who’s apparently decided I can’t do a single thing right!”

He blinked in surprise, and I spun around and stalked away before he could recover.

“Henry!” he called after me.

I ignored him and kept walking. I had no idea where I was going, but I wasn’t going to just stand here and let him scold me for being the only person in this city who was trying to stop the world from ending.

“Henry,” Jade said, reaching a hand toward me. “Don’t—”

“Henry, you can’t walk away from this!” Grandpa Teddy barked.

A flash of light came from behind me, and I felt a jolt of energy shot through my body. I froze, my muscles seizing up until I was roughly as mobile as a statue with really bad arthritis.

A chill went down my spine. Had Grandpa Teddy just used magic…against me?

I couldn’t turn to look, but the tapping of his cane told me he was coming closer. A moment later, he circled around me, the disappointment as thick as, well, clown makeup on his face.

“You have no idea how much I hoped that it wouldn’t come to this,” he said, shaking his head sadly. “But it’s become abundantly clear that I simply can’t trust you anymore, granddaughter.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked, a twinge of actual fear stirring in my stomach. Although, to be fair, it came out more like, “Wrrgh rrr mmmggnndr?”

As a testament to just how well he knew me, Grandpa Teddy understood exactly what I had said.

“I’m going,” he said, reaching into my pocket and pulling out the Escher Cube, “to talk to your parents.”

CHAPTER 5 - Chapter Four

Chapter Four

“Henry, could you come down here, please?” Dad called.

I stopped in my tracks, hugging myself. It had been nearly two hours since Grandpa Teddy had warped us home, and I’d been promptly banished to my room while the grownups talked downstairs. I’d spent the time pacing back and forth while my stupid imagination made up increasingly horrible—but not quite impossible—ways this could play out. Now that the moment had finally come, it occurred to me that none of those scenarios were actually going to happen.

Whatever did happen was going to be a hundred times worse.

“What are you so worried about?” Ethan asked as I slowly walked toward my bedroom door. He had been standing in the corner while Jade sat on my bed, watching me pace without saying anything. “It’s just your parents. It’s not like they can fire you like the council could.”

I shook my head. “No. It’s worse. They could ground me.”

“Funny.”

I turned to him, eyes wide. “You think I’m joking, but I’m not! My parents have a kind of control over me that the council could only wish they had! They may not be able to fire me, or arrest me, or pass laws, but there are a thousand little ways they could make my life miserable!”

“It can’t be that bad,” Jade argued.

I began to count on my fingers. “They can ground me, make it so I can’t leave the house without permission, forbid me to go anywhere without an escort, set a curfew so I can’t stay out late! A hundred tiny roadblocks, and they’ll just keep adding more and more until I finally cave in and give Grandpa Teddy what he wants.”

“Henry?” Mom called.

”The council is all bluster and no mustard, but my parents...” I hesitated, glancing at the door. “They know exactly how to hit me where it hurts, and they won’t hesitate to do it. All Grandpa Teddy has to do is convince them that it’s for my own good. He’s more devious than I gave him credit for.”

“I still think you’re overreacting,” Ethan said, going to the door and opening it for me. “Besides, Jade and I will be right here with you the whole time.”

Jade got up and squeezed my hand. “You’ve been through worse things than this, Henry. Stay strong!”

She fwooshed into her gem, and I had to look away so Ethan wouldn’t see my eyes starting to water. I quickly wiped them on my sleeve, then nodded.

“Let’s do this like fondue crisp,” I said, passing him and stepping into the hallway.

“Like…what?”

“I don’t know. I’m having a hard time thinking straight.”

The air felt heavy as we headed downstairs, even though the conversation in the living room seemed oddly light.

“Yes, production on my inhalers is coming along nicely,” Grandpa Teddy was saying, taking a sip of coffee. He was sitting in the recliner, rocking back and forth as if nothing in the world was wrong. “I’m actually hoping to officially make them available to the public within the next six months.”

“That’s wonderful, Dad!” Mom said from the couch. She turned when she saw us come in. “There you are! I was starting to think I would have to go wake you up.”

“Take a seat, both of you,” Dad said, gesturing toward the minicouch by the far wall. I know it’s technically called a loveseat, but that always sounded weird—especially when I was sitting next to Ethan.

“We ordered pizza,” said Mom. “It should be here any minute.”

Maybe this won’t be as bad as I thought, I told myself. You don’t order pizza if you’re planning to rip everything your daughter loves away from her.

As soon as I sat down, though, the atmosphere darkened.

Yep, I thought, bracing myself for the worst, there it is.

“So, Henry,” Dad said after a moment’s hesitation, “your grandfather tells us you’ve been sticking your nose in places it doesn’t belong.”

I turned to glare at Grandpa Teddy, who met my eyes unflinchingly. I felt my anger rise up again, my face turning blue. Sticking my nose where it doesn’t belong? Did they think I was five years old, and this was nothing but a scheme to find out where they’d hidden the cookie jar?

“Henry…” Ethan said, putting a warning hand on my shoulder.

I ignored him, standing back up. “How can you say it isn’t my business? It became my business when Le—”

“Henry!” Grandpa Teddy barked, his voice echoing through the room like a gunshot. “That is classified information!”

I stared at him in disbelief. “Even for my parents?”

“Absolutely! Being related to someone on the council—or the Hunter—doesn’t entitle them to hear state secrets.”

I threw my arms open. “How am I supposed to defend myself if I can’t even talk about…the thing we’re talking about?”

“Perhaps, just this once, you could try listening instead of talking,” said Grandpa Teddy.

I opened my mouth to tell him I would listen when the council started listening to me, but Mom cut me off.

“Henry, being the Hunter is a great thing, and we’re all very proud of you,” she said in that soft, reassuring, but still stern tone that only mothers can use. “But you need to understand…”

“Understand what?” I demanded.

“That not everything is your responsibility,” Dad answered.

“Your compassion and drive to help people are two of the things we all love most about you,” Grandpa Teddy said. “They’re what make you such a worthy Hunter—but a Hunter is all that you are. Your duty is to hunt maiams, and that is the only thing you are expected to do.”

I scoffed. “That sure wasn’t all I was expected to do—” I did my best Grandpa Teddy impersonation for that part, “—when there was a rogue ghul running around Burning Creek a few months ago.”

Grandpa Teddy stiffened, but didn’t reply.

“Henry!” Dad exclaimed, horrified. “How dare you speak to your grandfather like that?”

“This whole conversation is ridiculous!” I ranted, starting to pace back and forth across the living room. “Le…the bad person came after me! He wanted to use me to get to Ethan, and he wanted to use Ethan to hurt everyone I care about! How can you tell me that I’m not involved after you-know-what happened?”

“You were involved,” Grandpa Teddy said. “And as I’ve said before, I will never forgive myself for allowing things to get to that point. But that is over, Henry!”

“But it’s not over!” I yelled. “Victoria is—”

“You have no proof of that!”

“I WAS TRYING TO GET PROOF, BUT YOU STOPPED ME!”

“Henry, lower your voice!” Mom scolded me.

Grandpa Teddy shook his head, as calm as ever. “If anything else happens, then the council will handle it.”

“Like they’ve been handling it up till now? By doing absolutely nothing?”

“We are doing everything that can be—”

“I led you straight to…” I glanced at Mom and Dad again. “...one of the bad places, and you people did diddly squat with it until someone went and blew the whole freaking place up!”

“That’s enough, Henry!” Dad said.

“No, it isn’t enough!” I shot back. “This may not have anything to do with maiams, but it has everything to do with us! People are being tortured and killed—”

“Henry,” Grandpa Teddy said warningly.

“—and a magical psychopath is running around with a grudge against the entire klaon race, and I’m the only one who freaking cares! I’m the only one doing anything about it! And the people who I should be able to depend on more than anybody else are…are…”

I had to stop, trying desperately not to sniffle like the overemotional little girl that I absolutely wasn’t. I looked at my family. Mom. Dad. Grandpa Teddy. All the frustration that I’d been bottling up inside me over the past year was boiling over, threatening to make me explode like a shaken up can of soda. And after I sprayed my sticky brown anger all over everyone in the room, I’d be left empty. Hollow. Unable—and even worse, unwilling— to summon the energy to keep going.

Maybe that was Grandpa Teddy’s plan tonight. To make me lose control, let everything out in a big ugly tantrum, and get it out of my system. Maybe then I’d go back to being the obedient little granddaughter he so desperately wanted me to be. I’d go to school, I’d hang out with friends, and occasionally I’d fight an unholy abomination against nature, but I’d never talk back to him or look too deeply into anything he told me to stay away from.

Part of me wished it could be that simple. I had never thought of my life as simple before, but compared to the emotional rollercoaster that it was now, it really had been. But Grandpa Teddy was right about one thing: I did have a drive to help people. Even if I did what he said and started ignoring Legion and the laughter farms, there would always be that annoyingly moralistic voice in the back of my mind reminding me that there were people out there who were suffering, dying, and I wasn’t doing anything to help them. I’d give it two weeks, three tops, before it drove me cuckoo for Cocobutts.

Grandpa Teddy must have understood everything that was going through my head just by the expression on my face, because he sighed and looked down at the floor.

“You’re not going to listen, are you?” he asked softly. “No matter what I say, you’re never going to back down from this ridiculous crusade.”

I hesitated, then shook my head. “I’m sorry, Grandpa Teddy, but I can’t. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night knowing that this kind of evil is going on, and I wasn’t doing something to—”

Ding dong!

“That must be the pizza,” Mom said. “Henry, Ethan, will you two go get it, please?”

I deflated, feeling like my skin was hanging limp from my skeleton, and nodded. Ethan rose, and the two of us made our way to the entryway. For once, the thought of pizza didn’t cheer me up at all. Even the thought of eating made me feel sick. I put my hand on the doorknob, then stopped.

“Ethan,” I asked softly, “am I doing the right thing?”

“Yes,” he said without hesitation. He looked at me, and I was surprised by the determination I could see in his eyes. “Your parents just don’t understand. How could they, when they haven’t lived through it like we have? But you’re right, something does have to be done. And if the council won’t do it, then you’re the only one who can.”

I sniffed, then smiled. Gorgonzola cupcakes, I loved him, even if he didn’t love me back. I pushed open the door, already reaching out to take the pizzas from the delivery—

There was nobody out there.

CRASH!

I froze, then spun around.

“That came from the living room!” I yelled, already sprinting back through the house.

I was too late. By the time I got to the living room, Mom, Dad, and Grandpa Teddy were gone. The picture window looking out into our backyard had been shattered, and glass was scattered all over the place. Nothing else seemed to have been disturbed, but…

Someone I didn’t recognize sat on the couch.

“Hello, Henry,” he said. “Let’s talk for a bit.”

CHAPTER 6 - Chapter Five

Chapter Five

I stared at the figure—because a figure was all it was. You know those dark, blurry spots that get in your eyes when you stare at the sun for too long? Imagine that, except as a person, and you’ll start to have an idea of what I saw sitting there on my parents’ couch.

“Who are you?” I finally asked.

“Obviously, I’m not going to tell you that,” he said. His voice was distorted somehow, almost like a dozen people were talking at once.

Slowly, I reached for Splatsy. “Legion?”

“No. If you must call me something, you may refer to me as Vague.”

I snorted. “I’ll refer to you as whatever the egg drop soup I want, Blurry McSmearwipe!”

To my disappointment, Blurry didn’t rise to my bait. Instead, he just nodded. I’m not entirely sure how I know he nodded, since so much of him was just, as his name implied, one big, hard to look at blur, but I somehow just knew. Almost as if my eyes were seeing him, but something was stopping that information from reaching my brain.

“If that makes you feel better,” he agreed. “In the end, it doesn’t matter what you call me. All that matters is that you cooperate.”

I felt a hand touch my arm, and I jumped a little. But it was just Ethan. In the shock of seeing my living room destroyed and my family gone, I had forgotten he was there.

“Be careful,” he whispered.

“You should listen to your friend,” Blurry said. “Rash actions will only lead to tragedy, so why don’t you leave that hammer of yours in the hallway?”

“Yeah,” I scoffed. “I don’t think so.”

“Very well. Whether you like it or not, you are going to cooperate with me.”

Being careful not to step on any broken glass, I made my way across the room so that I was in between Blurry and the broken window. Ethan was still in front of the living room door, blocking his path to the entryway. Ethan didn’t have his spellhammer, but hopefully we wouldn’t need it as long as I had Splatsy.

“And what exactly am I going to be cooperating with you on?” I asked.

“I think you already know,” Blurry replied.

I scowled at him. If there was one thing I hated, it was when people got all uppity about answering questions. What do you think? You know the answer to this! Remember what we just went over five minutes ago in class? If I knew the answer already, do you think I’d still be asking? Why couldn’t people just…

I paused.

“You’re the one,” I said slowly, comprehension dawning on me, “who built the laughter farms.”

He nodded again.

I gritted my teeth, fighting the urge to draw Splatsy then and there. “Then why don’t I just call you by your real name, Ichabod?”

Blurry just shrugged. “I am not Ichabod Hench. But again, if that’s what it takes to ensure your cooperation, then so be it. I could not care less about what you choose to call me. That being said, I would appreciate it if we could move on to more important matters.”

“Fine by me,” I spat, pointing accusingly at him. “Even if you’re not Ichabod—which you are—you’re still the cause of every single one of my problems! Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t turn your head into a puddle of blurry pudding right now!”

He gestured at the living room. “Look around you, Henry. Where are your mother and father? Where is your grandfather?”

My temper flared, and I took a step toward him. “Is that supposed to make me not want to kill you?”

“Henry, don’t!” Ethan warned me.

“Young lady, do you have any idea how a hostage situation is supposed to work?” Blurry asked derisively. “I don’t particularly care about what you want, unless what you want is to see your family alive again someday. And if that is what you want, then I highly recommend you sit down and stop running that wretched mouth of yours so that we can talk like civilized people.”

I felt my hand inching towards Splatsy again, and I had to grab my wrist with my other hand to stop it.

Ethan walked over to stand beside me. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

I didn’t reply, just glared ice cold daggers at Blurry.

“He’s the one holding the cards right now,” Ethan insisted. “All we can do is play along and give him what he wants.”

“I could kill him,” I whispered back. “I could kill him so…very…easily.”

“And then whoever’s working for him would kill your family! Henry, please, for their sake just sit down and listen to him!”

They’ll kill your family. Those words struck me like I was a gong, and for a minute I could only stand there and try to stop shaking. Blurry waited patiently, completely at ease. Completely in control.

Finally, when I felt like I’d regained at least a little control over my body, I forced myself to sit down on the minicouch. Ethan sat down next to me, his hand still on my shoulder.

“Good,” Blurry said, nodding. “I’m glad to see you can rein in that temper of yours when the need arises.”

“We’ll see how long it lasts,” I growled. “Tell me what you want already!”

“Very well. As you’ve already deduced, I am the one behind the laughter farms. Unfortunately, while Legion has kept you distracted by puppeting Victoria around, he has been using his other avatars to locate my farms and destroy them.”

I sat forward, eyes widening. “Them? As in, there was more than one?”

“Of course there were. I could hardly run a successful business with only one small farm, could I? Not that it has mattered much, I’ll admit. Forcing people to laugh without mind control is extremely difficult, but I haven’t been able to use my talismans ever since Legion infected them. If I did, I would just be providing him with another avatar.”

I smirked joylessly. “Good for him.”

“Is it good, though?” Blurry asked. “You know as well as I do that he won’t be satisfied with the elimination of my farms. He intends to destroy all of klaonkind as well.”

“And that’s supposed to put me on your side?” I asked.

“No. The fact that I will kill your family if you don’t help me is supposed to put you on my side.”

I clenched my fist so hard my nails bit into my skin.

“As for what I want,” he went on, “you’re going to help me overcome this setback in my production.”

“You want me to help you kill and torture people?” I asked, my face turning blue with anger. Ethan reached out to put his arm in front of me. He shouldn’t have worried. I wasn’t going to do anything. Yet. Probably.

Blurry waved dismissively. “No, no, nothing that drastic. You’re merely going to procure a certain item for me.”

“What item?”

Instead of answering, he extended a hand toward me. I hesitated, confused, but then realized he was trying to hand something to me. Although touching this creep was the last thing in the world I wanted to do, I reached my hand out toward him, and jumped a little when I felt something be put into it. I drew my hand back, and something…detached…itself from his blurriness and solidified into a dark red envelope.

My heart skipped a beat.

“This is…” I stammered. “This is the envelope I got earlier today!”

Reflexively, I looked at the front door—or, more accurately, at the mail slot that only existed on the inside of the door. Whenever a klaon became a maiam, a letter would come through that slot telling me who they were and where to find them. But I had thrown the letter away right after I’d read it. It had never left this house!

With a shaking hand, I held the envelope up. “How…did you…”

“If you knew the full extent of my reach,” said Blurry, “you would be too afraid to even get out of bed in the morning.”

Again, I had to resist the urge to pulverize his nonexistent face.

“Fine,” I said, praying to the whoopee cushion in the sky that I came across as more confident and intimidating than my soft, quavery voice sounded. “What am I supposed to do with this, then?”

“Exactly what it says.”

I gripped the envelope so tightly that the paper crinkled in my hand. “What is that supposed to—”

“Henry, look!”

Ethan pointed, and I looked down at the envelope again. This time, I noticed something that hadn’t been there when I’d thrown it away. Three words, written in big, blocky letters so that they covered up the original addressee, “To She Who Bears the Title of Hunter.”

RETURN

TO

SENDER

“Between the two of you,” said Blurry, “your friend seems to be the brains in your little organization. If I were you, I would make listening to him my highest priority going forward. Do that, and you may just see your parents again someday.”

I stood up. “If you so much as lay a finger on them, I’m going to—”

Ethan took my hand, and I forced myself to swallow what I was about to say. The full weight of my helplessness pressed down on me, and I sat on the couch again next to him, fighting back tears. I wouldn’t let him see me cry. I wouldn’t!

“You still haven’t told us what it is we’re supposed to get for you,” Ethan said.

“No. I have not.”

“And you don’t think that’s a little unfair?” he challenged him. “You’re threatening to kill her entire family unless she brings you something, but you won’t even tell her what it is?”

“Not won’t,” Blurry corrected him. “I can’t tell you what it is I need her to bring me.”

“Then how—”

“My knowledge of that place is extremely limited. The extent of it is that they have something I need. Something that will help me get my production schedule back on track. Figuring out what it is will be the first step in your assignment, and bringing it to me will be the second.”

I glared at him. “How am I supposed to bring you something if you don’t even know what it is you’re asking me to bring you?”

“I hope you figure it out,” Blurry said, getting to his feet, “for your family’s sake.”

I stood up again, finally drawing Splatsy. “Where do you think you’re going? Sit down! You can’t leave me like—”

“I’ll be back in three days to collect.”

With that, he turned a Corner and vanished. I stared at the spot where he had just been, then let out a scream and slammed Splatsy down hard enough to shatter the hardwood floor. 

“ICHABOOOOD!”

CHAPTER 7 - Chapter Six

Chapter Six

“I’ll kill him!” I yelled, pacing back and forth through the living room. I’d been doing that a lot today, hadn’t I? “That piece of casu marzu! If he even thinks about touching them, I will hunt him down and kill him like the pile of maiam crap he is!”

By the way, don’t look up what casu marzu is. Trust me on this.

About forty five minutes had passed since Blurry had disappeared. I’d tried to follow him through the Corner, but those things are really hard to find if you don’t know exactly where they are and where they lead. Now it was past eleven o’clock, and I had school in the morning, but the idea of going to bed hadn’t even crossed my mind. I was as charged as an energy drink that had been struck by lightning.

“Henry, stop,” Jade begged me.

I had Splatsy in my hands, but I didn’t dare swing her. I already had a giant hole in my floor to worry about. I didn’t feel like explaining how the living room furniture had gotten all smashed up too when Mom and Dad…

Mom and Dad.

“I’LL KILL HIM!” I screamed again.

“Henry, please sit down,” Jade said again, reaching out toward me. I slapped her hand away and kept pacing.

“A lot of help you were, all nice and cozy in your core!” I spat. “I hope you were having a good time in there while I was bargaining to keep my parents alive!”

She ignored the jab. “You need to calm down.”

I spun to glare at her. “How am I supposed to calm down knowing Ichabod has my whole family captive?”

“We can—”

“And that the only way I can save them is by helping him do the one thing I’ve spent the last year trying to freaking stop?”

“We’re not saying you shouldn’t be upset,” Ethan piped up. He was still sitting on the minicouch. “But you’ll never be able to come up with a plan while you’re raging like this.”

Right. He was right. I hated that he was right, but he was right. Shrinking Splatsy back to ping pong paddle form, I hung her from my belt and went to sit down on the…I paused, looking at the indent that Ichabod had left on the couch cushion, then went and sat in the recliner instead. I didn’t even want my butt to touch what his butt had touched.

As soon as I sat down, I started rocking back and forth like I was trying to catapult myself to the moon. I tried to unclench my fists, but couldn’t.

Jade sighed. “I think that’s the best we can hope for right now.”

“So,” said Ethan, spreading his hands, “what are our options?”

“We could go to the council,” Jade suggested. “Teddy is a representative, so they’re bound to notice that he’s missing.”

“Yeah, great idea!” I snapped. “If they put as much effort into finding him as they are for the laughter farm problem, I’ll have my family back in twenty years!”

I got up and started pacing again, my temper flaring too high to just sit there.

“And in case you’ve forgotten, Ichabod is on the council too!” I ranted. “Do you really think he’d go to all the effort to kidnap my family just to agree to help un-kidnap them? And don’t forget that Legion is possessing Victoria. Oh yeah, wouldn’t that be a fun teamup?”

“Maybe we can do it without involving Ichabod or Victoria,” Jade said.

“That just leaves us with Patricia, and she’s going to insist on doing things by the book. That means getting Ichabod and Victoria involved—and, oh hey, look at that! We’re right back where we freaking started!”

“Jade is only trying to help,” Ethan snapped.

“Yeah, well, Ichabod isn’t going to let my family go just because we made such a gosh darn good effort,” I shot back, “so if Jade wouldn’t mind trying just a little bit harder, that would be great!”

Ethan was on his feet a moment later, stepping between me and Jade. “Henry, that’s enough!”

Without thinking, I grabbed him by his shirt. “No, it isn’t enough! It will never be enough until my family is safe and sound!”

“We know you’re upset,” he said infuriatingly calmly, “but abusing your friends isn’t going to help anything.”

“My parents—”

“Some of us already know what it’s like to lose our families!” A spark of anger appeared in Ethan’s eyes. “And they aren’t coming back.”

His words hit me like a whale-sized baseball bat. Letting go of his shirt, I stumbled backwards, putting a hand to my head. The room felt like it was spinning. I could feel Ethan and Jade’s eyes on me, piercing straight through the layer of white-hot anger and seeing the scared little girl beneath.

“I- I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I didn’t mean…”

Before I knew what was happening, Ethan had me wrapped up in a hug. Normally, that would have had me blushing harder than a simile I’m in no mood to make, but today it just hammered home how good of a friend he was to put up with my outbursts the way he did, and how lucky I was to have him. Jade joined him a moment later, their combined hug power proving to be stronger than a security blanket, and it was all I could do to keep from breaking down into tears.

“It’s okay, Henry,” Ethan said. “We’re going to get them back. I promise!”

A tear rolled down my cheek. Just one, I swear.

“We’re here with you until the end, Henry,” said Jade. “We’ve always been able to count on you, so now you can count on us.”

Okay, fine. Two tears. One for each friend.

“But you can’t let Ichabod get to you.” Jade said, letting me go. Ethan followed and sat down beside her on the minicouch. For once, I didn’t have it in me to be jealous. “He wants you to panic and lash out. Staying calm and thinking critically are how you’re going to beat him, and he knows that.”

“That’s when you’ve always been at your best,” Ethan added.

I looked at him. “My best?”

He nodded. “When you’re thinking. Remember how you beat Alicia?”

“I…took a pill that turned me into a ghul, then I turned into her worst fear,” I said. “Which also happened to be me. Then I turned her into a goldfish.”

“Exactly! You didn’t win because you were stronger than her, you won because you were smarter! That’s what you’re best at, Henry. You think outside the box and come up with solutions that nobody else could ever predict or counter!”

“And nothing could possibly be worse for Ichabod than you putting that imagination to work against him,” Jade agreed. “That means you need to stay strong, Henry. I know it’s hard, but you can do it.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know what—”

“Do it for your family’s sake!

I paused, then clenched my fist and nodded.

“I think this is a good place to start,” Ethan said, reaching out and picking up the envelope Ichabod had left us. “Have you looked inside it?”

I perked up. “There’s something inside?”

Ethan nodded and pulled out a sheet of paper, handing it to me. I unfolded it and held it up to the lamp to see. There were only seven words written on it, in the same handwriting as on the envelope.

I am ready to take the Trials.

“Any idea what that means?” Ethan asked.

I shook my head and handed it back to him. “It must be a message for whoever this sender is that Ichabod wants us to return the envelope to.”

“Then our first order of business is to figure out who that is,” Jade concluded.

“Henry, you’ve been getting these letters for years,” Ethan said, slipping the note back into the envelope. “Do you have any idea where they’re coming from?”

I shrugged. “The mail slot just spits them out whenever there’s a maiam for me to kill.”

“They have to come from somewhere.”

“Not really,” I argued. “It’s magic. Someone enchanted it to poof me up a letter whenever a klaon becomes a maiam, so that’s what it does.”

“Maybe.” Ethan didn’t sound convinced. For a minute, he just stared at the letter. “Have you ever tried looking through the mail slot, though?”

I paused. Had I ever tried looking through the mail slot? It sounded like the kind of thing I would do, but now that I thought about it, I didn’t think I ever had. With nothing better to go on, I went to the entryway, Ethan and Jade half a step behind me, and knelt down in front of the door. With one hand, I raised the mail slot’s metal flap, and pressed my face up against it to peer through.

“Do you see anything?” Jade asked.

“I…I’m not sure,” I admitted. “I think I see a light, but it’s too thin to make anything out.”

“Should we slide the letter through and see what happens?” asked Ethan.

I raised the letter, but hesitated. “What if we’re wrong and this isn’t what we’re supposed to do?”

“Then we’ll try something else.”

“But how are we going to get the letter back?”

Ethan paused and shared a look with Jade.

“Maybe we should wait,” he said a moment later. “Think about this for a while longer, and—”

I shook my head. “No, we don’t have that kind of time. Whatever it is Ichabod wants us to get for him, he’s only going to give us three days to do it. If we have to stop and think every step of this through, we’ll never be able to do this in time.”

“So what are you going to do?” Jade asked.

I took a slow, deep breath. “I’m going to follow our only lead and hope for the best.”

Then I slid the letter through the mail slot.

“Come on,” I whispered, pressing my face against the door again. “Come on!”

At first nothing happened. With every second that passed, my heart felt a little heavier. Had we been wrong after all? Had I just thrown away my only key to getting my—

Suddenly, a sound came from the other side of the door. It sounded like…trumpets?

I glanced back at Ethan and Jade. “You guys heard that too, right?”

They nodded mutely, eyes wide.

Slowly, I stood up and reached for the doorknob.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea, Henry?”

“Not in the slightest,” I answered.

I turned the knob and opened the door just a crack.

“YOU HAVE ACCEPTED THE—”

I slammed the door closed again.

“Nope!”

Ethan was by my side in an instant. “What did you see?”

“Nuh uh!” I turned around and walked away. “It’s too much!”

“Wait!” Jade yelled as I marched up the stairs.

“Too much! Can’t handle it! Going to bed!”

“But what about your—”

“Good night!”

I slammed my bedroom door behind me.

CHAPTER 8 - Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven

Norwegian black metal began to blast from my alarm clock, and my eyes snapped open. Sitting upright like Frankenstein’s monster after being tazed on the butt, I slammed my fist down on the clock over and over until it shut up. I had slept much more soundly than I’d expected. I guess it wasn’t all that surprising, now that I thought about it. I’d burned through an entire puberty’s worth of emotions in, like, forty minutes, and it had left me exhausted enough to sleep for nearly nine hours without dreaming at all.

I paused, looking at my crusty-eyed reflection in the mirror hanging from my wall. What if the reason I hadn’t dreamed was because…

I rolled out of bed and got dressed faster than I ever had before. Throwing open my bedroom door, I sprinted through the hallway where Ethan and Jade were already waiting for me.

“Henry—” Ethan said, but I ran straight past him and took the stairs three at a time.

“Mom?” I yelled. “Dad? Grandpa Te…”

I ran into the living room and saw the broken window and the hole Splatsy had made in the floor. It hadn’t been a dream after all.

Ker-smash!

Don’t worry. That was just the sound of my hopes and dreams shattering on the floor.

“Henry?” Jade asked.

I ignored her too. There was still one thing I needed to check. Going to the front door, I opened it a crack…

“YOU HAVE ACCEPTED—”

I closed the door. Yep, that was still there too.

With my hand still wrapped around the doorknob, my entire body sagged. It suddenly felt like I had spent the night juggling elephants. Jade put her hand on my arm, and I let her lead me into the kitchen, where Ethan was already pouring me a bowl of Chocolate Frosted Cocobutts (with marshmallow turds). I sat down at the table and took a bite, and immediately realized I wasn’t going to be able to eat it. Chocolate Frosted Cocobutts (with marshmallow turds) was the sweetest cereal you could legally buy. Its makers were required by law to classify it as a triple black diamond ultra-sugary substance, which the FDA had previously considered an impossible standard to achieve. Eating more than one bowl a day was considered extremely hazardous to your health, since the sugar would dissolve your teeth like pure acid. I had once seen a fly land in my bowl and take a single lick, only to burst into flames—either that, or it had flown away at the speed of light, and that burst of fire was all it had left behind.

And yet, today, it tasted like a mouthful of sawdust.

“Not hungry,” I mumbled, pushing the bowl away.

Ethan and Jade shared a worried look.

“At least take a couple puffs from your inhaler,” Ethan said, setting it on the table in front of me.

I looked at the little metal tube with its plastic nozzle. Even from here, I could smell the laughter inside. It smelled…wrong. This wasn’t a time for laughter. This was a time for stress, anxiety, and panicking until you pulled your hair out and gave yourself an ugly bald spot. Like a chocolate fountain at a funeral, laughter just wasn’t part of my world right now. Still, he was right. You don’t stop breathing because you can smell a tex mex restaurant after a bad breakup, and I couldn’t afford to go laughter starved when my family’s lives were hanging in the balance. Putting the inhaler in my mouth, I pressed down twice. Power surged through my veins, and I perked up a little. Just a tiny bit, but it did make me feel better.

“So, what are we going to do?” Ethan asked.

“There’s only one thing we can do,” I said softly, putting the inhaler back on the table. “Nobody hates the idea of kowtowing to Ichabod Hench more than I do…”

“You’re doing it for your family,” Jade interjected. “Nobody’s going to judge you for it.”

I looked at my genie friend, but couldn’t bring myself to contradict her. People would judge me for it. Every single innocent person who was added to Ichabod’s ever-growing corpse pile would judge me for it. I would judge myself for it. But as much as it curdled my girdles, I wasn’t going to let that stop me from saving my family.

“Do we have a plan of action, then?” asked Ethan.

I took a deep breath, closing my eyes. “Whatever it is Ichabod wants us to bring him, we can assume it won’t be something we can just walk up and take. If it was, he would have done it himself. That means we’re going to have to steal it. And if we’re going to steal something, then we need to get a professional’s help.”

“A professional?” Ethan echoed.

Jade nodded. “I agree. You should call him now.”

“Who?” Ethan asked.

I pulled out my phone. “The sneakiest guy I know.”

Ethan’s face paled. “Oh, not that guy!”

I dialed his number and held the phone to my ear.

“Yello?” the familiar, mischievous voice came from the other end.

“Hey, Aesop,” I said, trying to sound as casual as possible. “Feel like skipping school today?”

“Noooo!” Ethan whispered, sliding down in his chair until his head almost disappeared beneath the table. Jade patted his shoulder reassuringly.

Aesop laughed. “As if ye even need t’ ask, lass!”

“Good. Get over to my place as fast as you can. And…”

I glanced at my front door.

“…be ready to steal something.”

— —

About forty minutes later, I was sitting on the couch. The TV was on, playing a rerun of Oops, I Married a Giraffe, but even though my eyes were staring right at it—I don’t think I’d blinked in about ten minutes—I didn’t actually see any of it.

“Honeyyyyy,” I didn’t hear Jeremy Jeroff whine, “your parents filled my underwear drawer with divorce papers again!”

“Henry?” Aesop asked. He waved his hand in front of my face. “Helloooo?”

I blinked, snapping out of my trance, and turned to see Aesop standing beside the couch. His bright red hair, shaved down into a buzz cut, and oversized camo clothes looked oddly colorful considering how dreary the world seemed lately.

“A- Aesop?” I stammered. “When did you get here?”

“About ten minutes ago,” he snapped irritably. “I’ve been knocking nonstop, but you never let me in! I finally came around to your backyard, and I found your window broken, and you sitting here like you’ve been hypnotized by your freaking TV! You want to tell me what’s going on now?”

“You what?” I asked. “I didn’t hear any…oh yeah, I guess that makes sense.”

“What makes sense?”

I stood up and headed for the entryway. “Ethan! Jade! Aesop’s here!”

Ethan’s bedroom door was closed, but I heard something move around frantically for a few seconds before it flew open, and he and Jade hurried downstairs. Ethan’s face looked weirdly red—and was it just me, or was Aesop’s face turning red too?

I decided that I didn’t care.

“Hey, Aesop,” Jade said, offering the leprechaun a smile as she descended the stairs. “I haven’t seen you in a few weeks now. Have you been doing okay?”

Aesop looked at her, then at Ethan. His expression darkened, and he turned away without answering. Jade sighed.

“All right, listen,” I said once everyone was gathered in front of the door. “Yesterday, Ichabod Hench broke into my house and kidnapped my parents and Grandpa Teddy.”

“What?” Aesop exclaimed. “Are you—”

“Yes, I’m fine, but let me finish!” I cut him off. “Ichabod says if I don’t steal something for him in three days, he’ll kill them all! That’s why I need your help. Are you in?”

I expected Aesop to be fully on board the moment he heard the word steal. Instead, to my surprise, he narrowed his eyes at me. “What do you mean that’s why you need me?”

“I don’t…” I stared at him for a few seconds. “What do you mean what do I mean?”

“You only called me here because these two,” he jerked his thumb at Ethan and Jade, “couldn’t steal a free sample without feeling guilty? What am I, your backup friend?”

“Wha—” I shook my head. “Aesop, you’re here because my family is in danger, and I need people I know I can trust!”

He raised his bright red eyebrows. “So, what, you couldn’t trust me back when you were trying to save your brother? Is that it?”

“Are you deaf?” Ethan broke in before I could reply. “You did hear the part where Henry said her family is in danger, didn’t you?”

Aesop scowled, turning to point at him. “I wouldn’t be acting so high and mighty, punk! Or did you think I wouldn’t find out that you were selling me and my da fool’s gold?”

Ethan paled and took a step back.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought!” Aesop spat. “You don’t even want to know what leprechauns do to people who cheat them! The only reason I haven’t brought the sky down on your head is because I don’t want Henry and Jade to get—”

“CAN WE PLEASE,” I screamed, “FOCUS ON WHAT’S IMPORTANT HERE?”

Aesop gave Ethan one last dirty look, then turned back to me.

“All right, fine,” he begrudgingly agreed. “What are we stealing?”

“We don’t know.”

“Who are we stealing it from?”

“We don’t know.”

Aesop narrowed his eyes again. “Do you at least know where it is?”

I reached out and opened the door a crack.

“YOU HAVE ACCEPT—”

“In there,” I said, shutting it again.

Aesop’s eyes went wide. Cocking his head in curiosity, he grabbed the doorknob and opened the door.

“YOU HAVE—”

He closed it, giggled like a pyromaniac who had just found a can of gasoline and a book of matches, then opened it again.

“YOU HAVE—”

Slam!

“YOU HAVE—”

Slam!

“YOU—”

Slam!

“YOU—”

Slam!

“YOU—”

Slam!

“Will you please stop that?” Ethan shouted.

“Well, if one thing here is obvious,” Aesop said, grinning, “it’s that they’re expecting you. I say we play along for now, snoop around until we figure out what Ichabod wants us to steal, and then put the rest of the plan together once we have a better idea of what we’re dealing with.”

I nodded. “Makes sense to me.”

“I’m in,” Ethan agreed, making both me and Aesop look at him in surprise.

“I don’t like the idea of stealing,” Jade said softly. “But you three are my best friends in the world. If it helps save Henry’s family, then I’m with you until the end.”

“Well, no use in putting off the inevitable,” Aesop said, turning to me. “And I don’t know about you, but I am positively dying to see what’s behind that door. Open it already!”

When nobody else raised an objection, I stepped over to the front door, wrapped my hand around the knob…

And threw it open.

CHAPTER 9 - Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight

The first thing I noticed was the puppet—mostly because it was immediately thrust right into my face.

“YOU HAVE ACCEPTED THE TRIALS OF THE FIRST HUNTER’S HAMMER!” it yelled in a deep, booming voice.

I recoiled with a yelp, reflexively drawing Splatsy.

“Sorry!” it said, its voice quieter but still weirdly deep. “It’s been over three hundred years since anyone has undertaken the Trials. I may have let my excitement get the better of me. Although, it’s good to see that the Hunter's reflexes are still so sharp!”

I glanced at Ethan and Jade, who looked every bit as weirded out by this as I felt. Aesop, of course, was grinning like he'd just walked into a party full of rich people and couldn't decide if he wanted to hit the snack bar or start pickpocketing the other guests.

Reluctantly, I turned to face the puppet again. It was made of cloth, with faded white skin, patchy blue felt hair, and a pair of googly eyes that jiggled disconcertingly whenever it “spoke.” Two noodly arms hung uselessly from its shoulders, and it was perched on the end of a thick, round arm belonging to a thick, round man.

The puppeteer was wearing a long hooded robe, like some kind of monk, even though I've never heard of a monk whose robes were tie-dyed. A swirling pattern of red, purple, green, and blue covered his ample girth, and his hood drooped down low so I couldn't see his face. Not that it mattered, I supposed, since it wasn't like I was going to know anybody here anyway.

“Enough waiting!” the puppet exclaimed. “The anticipation is killing me. What is your name?”

“Um, hi?” I said, doing my best to lean away from the puppet and talk to the robed man. The puppet shifted so were face to cloth-face again. “I’m Henry Rider. Nice to meet you?”

“IT IS AN HONOR TO MEET YOU, RIDER OF HENRIES!” he roared, then cleared his throat. “Sorry. And I assume this is your retinue?”

It looked over my shoulder at my friends, and—forgetting that its eyes weren’t real—I stepped between them and it and turned up my nose in the best impression of Victoria I could manage. “They are, yes. Is that a problem?”

The puppet thought for a moment. “Usually, we only allow Hunters to pass through our gate, but seeing how it has been so long since we’ve had a visitor, I suppose some rule bending may be in order.”

The fat monk’s hooded face turned sharply to look at the puppet, but it didn’t seem to notice.

“Welcome to Jah Beryge!” it declared, and I sighed quietly in relief.

“What is this place?” I asked, looking around for the first time. We were standing in the middle of what looked like some kind of ancient Greek temple. Thick fluted columns rose from the floor to hold up a white marble ceiling. The room was twenty feet wide, and about twice as long, but judging by the way I could only see bright blue sky and clouds outside, I got the weird, vertigo-causing sensation that we were somehow thousands of feet up in the air.

The puppet has no eyelids, but I somehow got the distinct impression that it had just blinked in surprise. “You…do not know? But you must know! We got your letter just yesterday!”

The fat monk held up an envelope—the same envelope I had pushed back through the mail slot last night.

“Of course she knows!” Aesop interjected before I could reply. “She just wants to make sure you know.”

Behind me, I heard Ethan slap his forehead.

The puppet and the puppeteer exchanged a look, and for a few horrifying seconds I thought I had been found out. What would they do to me—to us—if they figured out we were imposters? At best they'd throw us back through the door, and then I'd never get the whatever-it-was that Ichabod wanted so badly.

At worst, we'd all soon be dangling by our nose hairs over a tank full of acidic piranhas. Yes, those are real. And yes, they hurt more than eating a nail sandwich without any mayo.

“I suppose it’s understandable for the Hunter to possess some degree of paranoia,” the puppet said slowly. “A wary heart is a beating heart, so it is said. Very well! This is Jah Beryge, headquarters of the Jocular Brotherhood of Zanni!”

The puppet looked at me with an air of expectancy.

“Good start,” I said, doing my best not to sweat bullets. “Go on.”

If the puppet had had eyebrows, I swear it would have raised one. “I, ah…very well, then. Come with me!”

The fat monk turned and walked away, holding the puppet out before him.

“What are you doing?” Ethan demanded as soon as he was out of earshot. “You want these people to help you, right? Why would you lie to them?”

I gave a guilty shrug. “We were lying to them before we even set foot in here.”

“What? How?”

“Do you think I really want to take this Trial?” I asked. “I don’t even know what the sweet and sour chicken it is!”

“Just tell them what’s going on,” Ethan urged me. “Maybe they’ll understand and agree to help!”

Aesop snorted. “Yeah, because that's how real life works.”

“They could just as easily throw us out of here,” I argued, shaking my head. “And then I’ll never rescue my family! Sorry, Ethan. I don’t like this any more than you do, but we’re sticking with Aesop’s plan for now.”

Ethan made a weird noise in his throat, but I ignored him and set off after the fat monk. He led us to a long, railingless stone bridge that arched out over the gap between this platform and another. Against my better judgement—because when have I ever listened to that?—I snuck a peak over the edge. What I saw nearly turned my blue hair white.

I had been right about us being really high up. But while I’d expected to find that we were on the roof of a weird ancient Greek-themed skyscraper, I instead realized that we were…well, nowhere. The platform we had just been standing on seemed to be floating in midair, supported only by the bridge that connected it to the platform we were heading towards, and a few other bridges leading to even more floating platforms. Below us, I could faintly make out the ground, though it was a strange dark blue color. I had no way of measuring it, but I had the vertigo-inducing feeling that, whatever was down there, we were miles and miles above it.

In the other direction, a massive stone pillar stretched down into the whatever-it-was beneath us. And when I say massive, I mean freakishly, mind-bendingly gigantic. I remembered the building we had been playing BnB on top of yesterday, and felt a chill go down my spine when I realized that you could have fit over a dozen of them inside that pillar—and that was just the part of it that I could see from here! If I was measuring things right, that was the center of this whole…place…and all of the floating platforms branched off from there.

Suddenly feeling queasy, I snapped my eyes upwards again.

Another of the floating platforms waited at the other end of the bridge. Glad to have solid ground beneath my feet again—and trying desperately not to think of the hundred million foot drop below it—I followed the fat monk into this new structure.

The first thing that caught my eye was a massive globe that hovered thirty feet over the floor. And by globe, I actually mean seven globes. And by that I mean two globes. And by that I mean fifty globes. And by that I mean…I’m gonna cut myself off there, or else this’ll go on forever. In any case, thousands—millions—of colored dots covered the globe(s), lighting it up in blues, greens, purples, and reds like a big round Christmas tree. Five rings rose from the floor, surrounding the globe(s), where what must have been close to five hundred more monks sat, scribbling furiously on stacks of paper as tall as I was. The rings slowly rotated in alternating patterns, like the world’s most boring merry-go-round, allowing each monk to see the globe and/or globes from every angle.

“What is that thing?” Ethan asked, looking up at it with wide eyes.

“It’s a map of every dimension,” Jade said. “Or all the ones we know about, at least.”

“Why does looking at it give me a headache?”

“Because your little baby human brain isn’t built to handle big boy knowledge like that,” Aesop said smugly.

Ethan glared at him, but Aesop just grinned and pretended not to notice.

“He’s right, though,” Jade said more softly. “It probably won’t drive you insane, but you should try to not look at it for too long anyway.”

The second thing I noticed were the staircases leading down below the floor. More monks were hurrying up and down them, most of them clutching little glass vials of some kind of colorful liquid. Just like the lights on the globe(s), I could spot blue, red, green, and purple ones.

I stopped dead in my tracks.

“That’s blood!” I exclaimed as a monk scurried past me, clutching a tiny glass of blue fluid. “Klaon blood!”

“Indeed!” the puppet confirmed with obvious pride in its voice. “This is the Kaleidoscopic Chamber! We’ve obtained a sample of blood from every living klaon…”

“Because that’s not creepy at all,” Aesop muttered. I elbowed him in the gut.

“...and with that, we are able to observe all of klaonkind! The moment a klaon becomes a maiam, their blood sample turns gray. And using our map,” the monk gestured toward the globe(s) with the puppet, “we are able to determine their location. An alert is then drafted and sent to the Hunter—that is to say, to you, Rider of Henries.”

I nodded in the most this-is-exactly-what-I-expected-to-hear way I could, and the fat monk turned and headed for yet another bridge. I followed, determinedly keeping my eyes facing forward this time. Not that it was hard, since the building we were heading toward was different from the others. While the rest of Gibberish, or whatever it was called, was composed of open air buildings, this one looked more like a fortress. Instead of marble, it was made of dark gray granite, and was entirely closed off. A door made of solid steel barred our way in, looking more like something that should have been attached to a bank vault than a…whatever the steamed asparagus this place was.

The fat monk held out his right arm, smooshing the puppet’s face right up against the door, and waited. A second later, the massive door rumbled and swung inwards, revealing a dark room. With a quick series of fwooshes, a line of torches came to life along the walls, filling the room with a flickering, greasy light. The fat monk led the way inside and I, suddenly feeling apprehensive, followed.

There were dozens of stone pedestals with glass cases on top, like this was some kind of creepy dungeon museum. As we crossed the room, the fat monk gestured toward them with the puppet.

“This is the Vault of Vulgar Humor,” it said, its deep voice echoing ominously off the stone walls. “It is where we store the items that have, in the past, threatened the lives and wellbeing of humans, klaons, and the world itself.”

The monk paused next to a pedestal, on which sat a pair of normal looking reading glasses.

“The Spectacles of Aathoreid,” the puppet said. “They give anyone who wears them the power to punch through solid steel.”

“Cool!” Aesop exclaimed. For a second, I was worried he would try to swipe them then and there. They were completely encased in glass, but there was a reason I had asked for his help. If a leprechaun wants something, chances are they’re going to get it.

I don’t know which was scarier: the thought of him getting caught, or of him actually getting away with it.

“This is the Flea Collar of Lurmk,” the puppet went on, gesturing to a cheap looking loop of plastic. “Put this on, and it will instantly spawn a swarm of fleas.”

“Isn’t that the opposite of what a flea collar is supposed to do?” Jade asked.

“Perhaps, but the fleas will attack everyone within a hundred foot radius except the one wearing the collar.”

“That almost sounds useful,” I said.

“Beware that line of thought,” the puppet said. The fat monk raised his arm so that it was towering over me. “For the Flea Collar of Lurmk spawns fleas in such a magnitude that they will drain every drop of blood in their victims’ bodies within seconds!”

“And by useful, I of course mean completely useless,” I quickly amended.

“This is the Key of Mentis,” the puppet said, going to the next item. On this pedestal sat a small bronze key—or, rather, half of one. It didn’t have any teeth, or whatever you call those jagged-y parts that make it actually work, just a pair of flat metal rings protruding side by side on one end, and a smooth, featureless rod on the other. It looked like something you’d stick in a windup toy, if you were a kid back when dinosaurs still roamed the earth.

“What does it do?” asked Ethan, leaning in for a closer look. I resisted the urge to grab him by his collar and pull him back. He had that look in his eyes that he only got when he thought he’d found a new magical toy to play with.

That look scared me even more than Aesop’s.

“If you insert the key into someone’s skull and turn it, it will allow you to rewrite their memories, their beliefs, and even their personalities.” The fat monk moved on, stopping next to a white ceramic pitcher. “The InfiniTea Pitcher. It dispenses an unlimited amount of sweet tea. It is quite delicious, or so I have been told by those who have working mouths and tongues.”

“That…” I paused and looked at it. In the dim light, I could faintly see a light brown liquid just beneath the rim. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“The last time it was overturned, we were forced to build a giant boat and put two of every kind of animal on it.”

The tea rippled gently, and I hurried to take a few steps back.

“And this,” the puppet declared, “is the reason you are here.”

It dramatically gestured with its entire body toward an iron gate set into the far wall. Chains thicker than my arm wound in between the bars, ending in a padlock bigger than my entire torso. Stepping up to the gate, I peered between the bars. It was difficult to make out what was on the other side in the dim light, but judging by its shape and size…

My heart began to race with excitement.

That’s a hammer! I thought. And it’s even bigger than Splatsy!

“The hammer of Opisthia,” the puppet said, the fat monk’s arm rising in pride. “The First Hunter.”

I had to snap my mouth closed, or else I would have started drooling on the floor. The First Hunter’s Hammer…and it could be mine? If Mr. Ventriloquist here was to be believed, all I had to do was pass some kind of test, and—

All those good feelings went out like a candle after a fifty ton wet sponge was dropped on it.

That’s what Ichabod wants, I realized, suddenly feeling like I was going to throw up. A weapon that powerful is exactly what he needs to fight Legion.

And I was going to deliver it straight to him. What other choice did I have, when he had my family as hostages?

“I must warn you,” the puppet said. “The Trials you are about to face will be more dangerous than you can imagine. Are you sure you are worthy to wield my hammer?”

I folded my arms. “I suppose there’s only one way to…wait, your hammer?”

If it was possible for an expressionless puppet face to look smug, it would have looked exactly how this puppet looked at that exact moment.

“I am,” it—or, he, I guess I should say—declared proudly, “Opisthia, founder of the Jocular Brotherhood of Zanni and the First Hunter for the Council of Shnoob! When my body failed me one thousand and five hundred years ago, I transferred my soul into this puppet so that I could continue my work protecting man- and klaonkind for eternity! But…surely you knew this?”

“Of course I knew!” I said quickly. “I just didn’t expect a fifteen hundred year old puppet to look so…young! What, uh, do you put on your skin?”

“Once a month, I have my disciples throw me in the laundry!” Opisthia declared, as heroically as if he were describing the time he had slain an army of dragons.

“Very…inspirational,” I said. “But yes! My answer is yes. I will take your Trials and prove myself worthy of your hammer!”

“EXCELLENT!” Opisthia roared in approval, his voice echoing deafeningly through the vault. “WE SHALL BEGIN IMMEDIATELY!”

“Loud!” Aesop complained, clapping his hands over his ears.

Opisthia paid him no attention. “BROTHER KRAUBUS!”

There was the patter of feet, and a klaon stuck his head into the vault. “Yes, Father Opisthia?”

“THE TRIALS OF THE FIRST HUNTER’S HAMMER BEGIN NOW! SUMMON BROTHER HUMDINGER AND SISTER SWOOSH!”

— —

Five minutes later, we stood before yet another enclosed structure. A massive pair of wooden double doors kept us from seeing inside, but two columns of tie-dyed klaons were hurriedly filing their way in through two smaller doors on either side.

“Rider of Henries,” said Opisthia, the fat monk’s arm fully outstretched toward me, “through this door is the Court of Dueling Wits, where disputes between members of the Brotherhood are reconciled according to ancient tradition.”

Ethan raised his hand. “Ancient tradition being…”

“Extreme and uncompromising violence! Here, the Rider of Henries will face the first test in the Trials of the First Hunter’s Hammer.”

I took a step forward. “I’m r—”

“What kind of test are we talking about?” Ethan cut me off.

I turned to glare at him, but found I couldn’t put too much energy into it. I wanted to rescue my family as ASAP-ishly as possible, but I guess jumping straight into a “test” without knowing what I was getting myself into might have been a little…

“Stupid” is probably the word Ethan would use.

“Waiting for you in the Court of Dueling Wits are two of the Brotherhood’s most powerful warriors,” Opisthia explained. “Their names are Brother Humdinger and Sister Swoosh. Your goal is to defeat them both.”

I nodded. “I’m r—”

“First,” interrupted Opisthia, “you must know that it is forbidden to use any weapons other than your hammer. While we encourage our Hunters to expand their arsenal according to their need and their growing skills, here in Jah Beryge we limit ourselves to the arts of Hammer Warfare.” The fat monk held out his empty hand. “If you would, please turn them over.”

I frowned, but did as I was asked. A few seconds later, the fat monk was struggling to hold Prinkle, Prunkle, Globber, and Spazzy Basil in one hand.

After a moment’s hesitation, I gave him my inhaler too. Opisthia had only said I needed to hand over my weapons, and my inhaler wasn’t a weapon, but I quickly weighed the pros and cons of trying to bring it with me. Without it, I couldn’t recharge my laughter if I used it all up. But Opisthia might also consider that cheating and disqualify me from the Trials, and then I’d never be able to save my family. It just wasn’t worth the risk.

“Are there any other matters you need to attend to before the Trial begins?” asked Opisthia.

I shook my head. “I’m—”

“What happens if Henry fails the test?” Jade asked.

“—going to punch the next person who does that!” I finished.

“If the Rider of Henries fails, then she will not be allowed to inherit the First Hunter’s Hammer,” Opisthia answered. “And you will all be required to leave Jah Beryge immediately.”

“That much is obvious,” she replied. “I meant, will Henry…”

“Survive?” Opisthia asked, chuckling with his expressionless felt face. “Yes, she will be alive when the fight ends. Although I can’t make any promises beyond that.”

He paused, glancing at the fat monk, then turned back to me.

“I suppose it is worth pointing out, though,” he clarified, “that we expect the same to be true for Brother Humdinger and Sister Swoosh, as well. You will have to use every ounce of your skill and power to defeat them, and we by no means expect them to escape unscathed, but we would greatly appreciate it if they were both still alive when the fight is over.”

I nodded, opened my mouth, but then hesitated. When nobody voiced any other concerns, I fixed Opisthia with my steeliest gaze and said, “I’m r—”

“I want to interrupt Henry too!” Aesop blurted out.

I whirled around and grabbed the leprechaun by his shirt.

“Please don’t, please don’t, please don’t!” he begged as I dragged him a few steps away from the others.

“Listen,” I said quietly once we were out of earshot, “while I’m doing this, can you sneak back into the Vault of Vulgar Humor without being seen?”

Aesop snorted. “Who do you take me for? Ethan?”

“Then do it, and scope out the security as best you can. Try to find out if there’s a way around that gate, but don’t do anything yet. Got it?”

He saluted me. “Can do, mon capitan!”

I glanced back and realized the others were staring at us, so I gave Aesop a quick punch in the arm.

“Ow!” he yelped. “What was that—”

“And let that teach you to never interrupt me again!” I said loudly enough for them to hear, wagging my finger in his face.

He glared at me as I made my way back over to the others. I hoped he would be smart enough to figure out why I’d done that, but I would apologize later if he didn’t. What was important right now was that he did what I’d told him, and I doubted there was a leprechaun on the whoopee cushion in the sky’s green earth that wouldn’t leap at the chance to get some time alone with a room full of forbidden treasures.

Oh, sweat water taffy, I thought as the full weight of what I’d just done struck me, I hope I didn’t just inadvertently cause the end of the world or something.

It was too late to worry about that, though. I was already marching back toward Opisthia. The puppet cocked his head in what was probably the closest his face could get to showing curiosity.

“I’m ready,” I said.

“THEN LET THE FIRST TRIAL COMMENCE!” he roared so loudly that my vision went double for a few seconds. Behind him, the double doors began to open.

“Henry, are you sure about this?” Ethan asked.

“I hope so,” I said, blinking until I could see straight again. “Because I don’t think they’ll let me back out now.”

I turned to look as the congregated monks let out an enthusiastic cheer. I suppose I couldn’t blame them. In the hour or so I’d been here, I hadn’t seen a single TV. This was probably the most entertainment they’d had since shadow puppets were invented. More importantly, I noticed that Aesop was already gone. Since nobody was currently screaming about little green thieves, I had no choice but to assume he’d successfully snuck away unseen, which meant I could focus all of my attention on whatever was going to happen next.

As the doors swung wider, Jade stepped up and put her hand comfortingly on my shoulder.

“We’re here for you, if you need us,” she said softly.

I nodded, then stepped forward through the gigantic wooden doors and into the…what had Opisthia called it? The Court of Dueling Wits? I stepped in there.

This room, like the Vault, had walls and a ceiling. It was about the size of a basketball court, and pillars ran the length of the room on both sides. Up above me, a wraparound balcony surrounded the entire room, filled with monks hooting and hollering in the most un-monkish way I could imagine.

At the far end of the room stood what I could only assume was Brother Humdinger. He was dressed in the same tie-dyed robes as everyone else, but he…was…HUGE! At least eight feet tall, and five feet wide, he grinned stupidly at me from beneath a mop of unruly green hair. Beside him stood a sledgehammer bigger than I was, its handle pointing up at the ceiling. Reaching out with a meaty fist, he grabbed the hammer and hoisted it as if it only weighed as much as a cotton swab.

I drew Splatsy, extending her to warhammer form.

“HURRR HURRR HURRR,” Brother Humdinger guffawed, his voice so low that I felt it more than I heard it. “LITTLE BABY HAMMER.”

My face turned blue with anger. You can insult me. You can insult my friends. But when you insulted my hammer, you had better get to contacting your next of kin. Hold on, though. Hadn’t Opisthia said I was going to be fighting Brother Humdinger and—

Motion caught my eye, and I looked up to see another figure stepping up onto the balcony railing about thirty feet above me. She was tall, maybe six and a half feet, and as thin as a parking meter on a diet. With a dramatic flourish, she swept back their hood, letting long purple hair spill down her back, and then stepped off the balcony. She fell gracefully, landing right next to Brother Humdinger. In her hand, she held a long staff. On its end was the head of a small carpenter’s hammer. A spearhammer, I think it was called. She raised it, gave it a skillful twirl, and then fixed me with a cold purple stare.

“Sister Swoosh, I presume?” I asked.

She didn’t answer.

“Okay, cool,” I said. “Good talk.”

And then Sister Swoosh shot at me from across the room.

CHAPTER 10 - Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine

Sister Swoosh thrust her spearhammer forward, and she slid across the room as if the floor was made of ice and she had rockets tied to her heels. I dove to the side, only barely managing to dodge the spearhammer’s smooth, curved head. Her weapon streaked past, less than a foot away from my head—and then a freaking bolt of lightning shot out of the tip!

My eyes widened in horror as it zigzagged out of her spearhammer and struck the wall behind me hard enough to send jagged shards of rock flying everywhere. A deafening BOOM rang through the Court of Dueling Wits a moment later, and the monks up on the balcony roared in approval.

I charged my shoes and leaped backwards, trying to put distance between me and Sister Swoosh. The moment my feet hit the floor, though, even more booms began to reverberate through the room. I flinched, thinking they were coming from Sister Swoosh. An attack from her spear, I could dodge—barely. But if she decided to start shooting lightning at me from across the room, I was done for. When I wasn’t instantly deep fried like a possum at a Louisianan wedding reception, though, I opened my eyes in surprise to see Sister Swoosh just standing where I’d left her. So what was making those…

Oh, shish kabobs.

“JELLY SMASHIN’ TIME!” Brother Humdinger yelled in childish delight.

I spun just in time to see the massive klaon bearing down on me, his equally massive hammer held out in front of him like a battering ram. Each footstep shook the ground, and I was forcibly reminded that we were, like, a billion feet up in the air right now. I didn’t have time to worry about the structural integrity of Jah Beryge, though, and hastily dodged a second time just as Brother Humdinger came roaring past with all the power and subtlety of a freight train. He crashed headlong into the wall behind me, leaving a perfectly Brother Humdinger-shaped imprint in the stone wall. For a moment I dared to hope that he had knocked himself out, but then he giggled and set to work peeling himself free.

I’ve fought maiams with more braincells than this guy! I thought, staring at him in disbelief.

“Henry, look out!”

My attention was pulled back to the situation at hand, and I turned to see Sister Swoosh winding up to take another lunge at me. Thinking fast, I charged up my shoes again, but this time I didn’t dodge to the side. When Sister Swoosh came rocketing toward me, I instead launched myself straight upwards.

For a second, I found myself face to face with Ethan and Jade, who had gone up to the balcony to watch the fight.

“How am I doing?” I asked.

“Henry, you need to—” Jade began to say, but got cut off when I fell back down again.

I raised Splatsy as I plunged toward Sister Swoosh, charging her up with power. These two were bad news, and fighting them both at the same time was even worse. My best bet was to eliminate one of them as quickly as possible so I could give the other all of my attention. I just had to hope that doing so didn’t cost me too much laughter.

Sister Swoosh glanced up at me as I prepared to turn her into Sister Pancake, and leaped nimbly out of my way just as I crashed back down—but she wasn’t fast enough. Splatsy slammed into the floor a split second after I did, releasing all the energy that was stored inside of her in a shockwave of glowing blue light. While Swooshie may not have been hit by Splatsy herself, the magic still hit her like a truck and catapulted her across the room.

“Ha!” I yelled, watching her fly. “Henry draws first blood!”

Then Sister Swoosh did a graceful backflip and landed catlike on the floor thirty feet away, her spearhammer already drawn back for another attack.

Aw, crapjacks, I thought as she thrust the spearhammer forward. I tried to leap out of the way again, but I could already tell I wouldn’t be fast enough this time.

Fortunately, Brother Humdinger saved me.

Unfortunately, he did that by smashing his hammer into me from behind and charging across the room with me stuck to it like a bug on a windshield.

I felt the air crackle as the lightning bolt flashed past, its thunder driving a nail into one of my eardrums and out the other. I couldn’t move, could barely keep my grip on Splatsy, and was only able to watch as Brother Humdinger raced toward the opposite end of the room as fast as his chunky legs could carry us. For a second, I thought he was going to trample Sister Swoosh, but the lithe monk (or would she be a nun?) slid easily out of his way as he steamrolled past her.

The wall was rushing up to meet us, and Brother Humdinger obviously had no plan beyond ramming into it face first again. I didn’t need Ethan or Jade’s so-called “common sense” to tell me that I wouldn’t survive the impact. I needed to get away, but how was I supposed to do that when I was stuck to his hammer like one of those spinning carnival rides?

The palm of my left hand was pressed against the sledgehammer’s cold iron head. An idea came to me, and since I had a clearly visible deadline looming in front of me, I didn’t stop to think about it.

Charging up my magic, I forced it into my left hand. It exploded out through my palm, unsticking me from the hammer and shooting me to the right. I somehow managed to roll across the hammer, flopping over the edge a heartbeat before Brother Humdinger went careening into the wall without me.

I hit the floor just as he hit the wall with a CRUNCH that any cereal company would have paid a fortune to use in their commercials. It would probably take him another few seconds to pull himself free, but I still had Sister Swoosh to worry about. Getting my feet back under me, I took off running back the way I’d just come. I didn’t know where I was headed or what I was going to do next. All I knew was that I needed to get as far away from where I currently was as quick as possible.

Sure enough, there was a flash of light, and thunder roared through the air a split second later. I jumped and spun, following the zigzagging bolt to where Sister Swoosh was standing on the other end of the room, and dug my heels into the floor to skid to a halt. Then, charging Splatsy up yet again, I drew her back behind my shoulder like a baseball bat and hurled her with all my strength at the thin robed woman.

Please let this work! I thought. If it didn’t, then I had just thrown away my only means of defending myself for no reason.

Splatsy whirled, becoming a shining blue blur as she flew across the room. Sister Swoosh saw her coming and sidestepped the attack. That was fine. I had expected that. What Sister Swoosh hadn’t expected, though, was for me to release Splatsy’s magic before she had hit anything.

The moment Splatsy soared past Sister Swoosh, I discharged all the energy I had crammed inside her. A ball of bright blue energy exploded out of her in the blink of an eye, faster than even Sister Swoosh could react, and she was blasted backwards. She struck the wall hard enough to leave a Brother Humdinger-style imprint in the wall—and as a special, unexpected bonus, the explosion sent Splatsy flying back in my direction. While it would have been awesome if I’d been able to catch her out of midair like some kind of bad molasses, I took what I could get and chased after her with my hands outstretched like a three year old chasing a ping pong ball while she skittered across the floor.

When I picked her up again, she felt heavier than she had a few seconds ago. She hadn’t changed, of course—I had. I was using my magic up at a dangerous rate, leaving my body weakened and tired. I wasn’t done yet—not by a long shot—but if I wanted to have any chance of beating these two, I was going to have to be smart about this.

I’m doomed, I thought.

“AGAIN, AGAIN!” Brother Humdinger roared as he finally pulled himself out of the wall. He turned and saw me standing alone in the middle of the room and raised his hammer with a grin. Either he didn’t see Sister Swoosh making rock angels in the wall a few yards away from him, or he didn’t give a half-eaten onion ring about it, because he charged at me all over again.

I ducked behind one of the nearby pillars. If this palooka was half as dumb as he was letting on, then maybe I could confuse him by running circles around the pillar like in one of those old cartoons. What I would do then, I still wasn't sure, but I didn't exactly have time to stop and—

Brother Humdinger drove his hammer straight through the pillar.

“Holy Mother of Sausage!” I yelled as huge chunks of marble began to fall from the ceiling. I leaped backwards to avoid it, and not a moment too soon because another one of Sister Swoosh’s lightning bolts flashed past a heartbeat later, striking one of the falling blocks and blasting it straight into Brother Humdinger’s massive gut.

“DOOOOF!” he grunted as the air was driven from his lungs. His face contorted with anger, and he grabbed the offending block and hurled it across the room—but not at me.

At Sister Swoosh.

“What are you doing, you idiot?” she cried, dodging out of the way. The block, which couldn't have weighed less than seven hundred pounds, hit the far wall and shattered into a thousand little pieces. “We're supposed to be working—”

“YOU HURT MY TUMMY!” Brother Humdinger roared, charging toward her with his hammer held out.

Sister Swoosh darted behind a pillar, and Brother Humdinger went barreling past her. I watched as he crashed into the wall again, suddenly feeling oddly left out—until I realized that for the first time since the fight had started, Sister Swoosh wasn't looking at me.

Sensing an opportunity that wouldn't come a second time, I sprinted toward her, charging Splatsy as I ran. She noticed the blue glow coming off of Splatsy as I drew nearer, and in one fluid motion she spun around and thrust her spearhammer toward me.

Time seemed to slow down. Electricity sparked and flashed as it zigzagged out of the tiny, curved hammer, coming straight for me. This time, though, she didn't have the element of surprise on her side.

I did!

I sidestepped her attack, letting the lightning streak past me on my right. Then I spun to face her. I had noticed something the other times she had attacked me. While her lightning attack only lasted for a fraction of a second, that was a fraction of a second that she was completely immobilized. In any other fight, that wouldn't have mattered. A split second of not being able to move was more than a fair trade off, considering how quickly she could move and how powerful that attack was.

But I wasn't just any other fighter. I was the Hunter, and McGus had taught me to seek every weakness my opponent had, then use it against them. So, while Sister Swoosh was busy blowing another chunk out of the wall, I brought Splatsy down on her spearhammer, shattering it like a toothpick.

Sister Swoosh's eyes went wide. “What have you—”

Then Splatsy hit the floor, and I discharged all her energy, blasting Sister Swoosh back with the force of a tidal wave straight to her face. I had hoped that would be enough to end the fight then and there, but she proved to be tougher than that. Performing another epic backflip, she landed twenty feet away, glaring at the broken spearhammer, then at me.

She stretched her mouth wide in a scream of rage. “You brat! Do you have any idea how much that—”

THOOOOM!

Brother Humdinger's hammer came down on her, squashing her like an insect.

“TUMMY AM AVENGED NOW!” he laughed.

I stared at him in horror. Opisthia had told me not to kill either of his fighters! Brother Humdinger hadn't just squashed Sister Swoosh, he had squashed my hopes of ever seeing my family again!

Then he raised his hammer, and instead of the smeared purple remains of Sister Swoosh, all I saw were a few glowing magic particles floating away in the breeze. Blue light flashed in the corner of my eye, and I turned to see Sister Swoosh appear up on the balcony beside Opisthia and the fat monk. She sat down, folding her arms with a petulant expression on her face, and Opisthia nodded to me. The message was clear.

You haven't done anything wrong. Now finish the fight!

I turned back toward Brother Humdinger, and he grinned at me as he raised his massive hammer for another swing.

It was time to end this.

CHAPTER 11 - Chapter Ten

Chapter Ten

The arena went silent in anticipation as I squared off against Brother Humdinger.

All right, think! I told myself. Taking out Sister Swoosh had cost me more energy than I liked, and the fight was only half over. Obviously I was never going to be able to outmuscle this enormous blockhead, which meant I was going to have to outsmart him.

I grinned. This was going to be like stealing candy from an Ethan.

The question was, what would be the best way to outsmart him? The overweight baboon’s moveset obviously began and ended with slamming himself face first into the wall. I quickly glanced around. He had already destroyed one of the pillars holding up the balcony above us. How many more would it take before the whole thing came crashing down on his…

Ethan and Jade are up there, I reminded myself, and discarded the idea. I needed to come up with something that involved less getting-my-friends-killed. Maybe I could—

“HUP!”

Brother Humdinger, apparently tired of waiting for me to come up with a brilliant strategy to beat him, bent his knees and rocketed up toward the ceiling. I couldn’t help but stare as the living boulder shot nearly forty feet into the air, did a surprisingly graceful flip, and…

Oh, garlic bread, I thought.

Charging my shoes, I blasted myself to the side. Half a second later, Brother Humdinger came crashing down again, butt-first. My eyes widened as the floor rippled around him, the stone rising and falling as if it were made of water. I tried to jump over it, but wasn’t able to charge my shoes again in time. I still almost made it—because I’m just that awesome—but the tip of my toes barely clipped the rocky shockwave, and I was sent corkscrewing out of control until I slammed face first onto the floor, my head spinning too hard for me to even tell which way was up.

“Henry, move!” I heard Ethan yell from above-below-behind-inside-yesterday.

“Yes, Grand Poohbah,” I muttered, and rolled to the side a moment before Brother Humdinger’s sledgehammer came crashing down where I had just been lying. A smaller shockwave rippled out from around it, launching me up into the air again. This time, it only sent me flying a few feet. I shook my head, forcing myself to focus, and twisted in midair to land on my feet again.

Ha! I thought. See? I can do cool flips too!

A shadow fell over me, and I spun around to see Brother Humdinger winding up to take another swing. Dropping to one knee, I charged my shoes again and blasted forward. The hem of his tie dyed robe smacked me in the face, the stench nearly making me choke, but I shot right between his legs and out the other side before his sledgehammer even touched the ground. The floor rumbled again, and I sprang back to my feet and spun to face him. Another shockwave spread out from where he’d just attacked, but to my surprise the five thousand pound dimwit’s body was enough to stop it in its tracks, leaving me safe since I was behind him.

Now was my chance! His back was to me, and he was still gathering his strength for his next attack. Drawing Splatsy behind my head, I charged her with magic and let her fly! She whizzed across the room toward Brother Humdinger, slamming into the back of his rock-hard head with another explosion of pure magic—and when I say rock-hard, I mean it, because she bounced right off of him with all the impact of one of those paper footballs people flick at each other during school.

“Well, floptarts,” I whispered as she fell uselessly to the floor thirty feet away.

“WHERE SHE GO?” Brother Humdinger asked, standing up straight and scratching the back of his head like he’d just felt a fly land there.

While he was still distracted, I sprinted after Splatsy. My footsteps echoed as I dashed across the arena. The floor had all but been reduced to gravel by his buttflop attack, and every step I took sent rock chips clattering against each other behind me.

“HUH?” the gargantuan gumbrain grunted, and finally turned around. “OH! THERE AM YOU!”

I glanced over my shoulder just in time to see Brother Humdinger take to the sky again. Splatsy was still ten feet away. I reached out toward her, as if I were some kind of space wizard and could make her float back to my hand, but she stubbornly sat there and waited to be picked up like the prissy little primadonna she was.

Down came Brother Humdinger, plummeting out of the sky like it was raining refrigerators, and I just managed to snatch Splatsy off the floor before he landed. Another tidal wave of marble erupted around his butt, and this time I turned to face it head on. Charging Splatsy, I swung her like a golf club, releasing the magic just as the shockwave reached us. I could feel the force behind his buttflop pushing against Splatsy’s power, and for a second I was terrified that she wouldn’t be up to the task.

Then, with a flash of blue, the shockwave parted, leaving me untouched.

“HEY!” Brother Humdinger howled indignantly, getting back to his thick, chunky legs. “NO FAIR!”

As he stood up, I noticed something. A series of thin blue lines were embedded in the floor right beneath his feet. It took me a second, but as soon as I realized what I was looking at, my brain kicked into high gear.

That was how I was going to beat him!

“Oh, sorry, was that against the rules?” I asked.

Brother Humdinger paused, looking at me with the most confused expression I had ever seen. After wracking his brain—or whatever he had inside his skull—for a few seconds, he nodded vigorously.

“Okay,” I told him. “Go ahead and try again. I’ll play fair this time!”

Brother Humdinger considered my offer. “YOU PROMISE?”

“Cross my fart and hope for pie!”

Brother Humdinger blinked. “PIE?”

“Yes, pie for everybo—”

“PIIIIEEEEEE!”

With his surprisingly strong legs, he leaped up into the air again, nearly hitting his head on the arena’s ceiling. As soon as his feet left the ground, I charged my shoes and blasted away from him, then immediately charged them again when he began to fall. A split second before he hit the ground, I shot up into the air as well.

CRUNCH! went his brobdingnagian buttocks (look it up, I’m not explaining it) as they collided with the floor at a thousand miles per hour, and the blue cracks spread even further out around him.

“HEY! YOU LIED!” Brother Humdinger whined, looking up at me with all the dignity of a toddler wearing XXXXXL-sized diapers.

“Sorry!” I shouted back down at him as I began to fall. I raised Splatsy over my head and charged her with power. “Let me make it up to you!”

I hit the ground and swung, smashing Splatsy down into the gravel as hard as I could. I channeled every ounce of her magic down into the floor, and there was a muted THUD as a flash of blue poomphed up like a cloud of dust all around us.

The floor rumbled, and Brother Humdinger looked up at me in confusion as more and more blue cracks began to spread out around him. Charging my shoes one last time, I blasted up and backwards, leaving Brother humdinger sitting in the middle of the mess he had made.

Slamming his sledgehammer down onto the floor, he hauled himself upright and roared, “ONLY BAD LADIES LIE ABOUT PIE!”

But before I could point out that I hadn’t lied about the pie—Or had I? This whole conversation left me just as confused as he was—he took one lumbering step toward me, and the floor finally gave way beneath his titanic flab. Blue may have been my color, but I couldn’t take credit for the blue cracks in the floor. Those were all him, even though he, himself, was a Green.

Confused? In all the excitement, you probably forgot that the Court of Dueling Wits was approximately seventy million miles above the ground. So high up that we could actually see the sky below us. And that’s exactly what those beautiful blue lines were, and why Brother Humdinger began to panic as the floor buckled under him.

The sky.

“NOOOOOO!” he howled as the ruined floor crumbled to pieces beneath his feet. He dropped his sledgehammer—the sheer weight of his weapon opened up another hole right beside him—and scrambled to pull himself back up to safety. But no matter how deep he dug his meaty fingers into the floor, he couldn’t stop himself from sliding to his doom. “WHAT ABOUT—”

His fingers slipped free, and he disappeared through the hole.

“—PIIIIEEEEEEEE?”

The crowd up in the balcony gasped in horror, but a few seconds later I saw the telltale sparkles rising back up through the hole, and Brother Humdinger appeared next to Opisthia just like Sister Swoosh had.

The four hundred gallon goon paused and looked around in confusion. “PIE?”

“Yes,” Opisthia said as the fat monk patted his stomach comfortingly, “we can all have some pie later.”

“MMMM,” the gluttonous gorilla rumbled. He sat down, shaking the entire balcony, apparently satisfied.

“THE RIDER OF HENRIES HAS PASSED THE FIRST TRIAL!” Opisthia declared, his voice echoing through the Court of Dueling Wits. “HER JOURNEY TOWARD INHERITING THE FIRST HUNTER'S HAMMER SHALL CONTINUE…”

My heart leaped inside my chest as the crowd erupted into cheers. I scanned the balcony until I spotted Ethan and Jade, and beamed at them. I had done it! There were still two Trials to go, but right then I felt like I could clobber a thousand Brother Humdingers and outrun a million Sister Swooshes. Nothing could stop—

“TOMORROW!”

I froze, looking up at Opisthia. “What? Tomorrow?”

“YES! TOMORROW!”

My heart fell into my stomach, splashing half-digested breakfast all over my insides. “But I'm ready to take the second Trial now!”

“ARE YOU SURE ABOUT THAT?” Opisthia asked, like a parent whose three year old had just told them they were going to run for president. “YOU KNOW YOU ONLY GET ONE CHANCE TO COMPLETE EACH TRIAL, DON'T YOU? ARE YOU SURE YOU DON'T WANT TO REST, RECOVER, AND COME BACK TOMORROW FOR THE NEXT TEST?”

I paused just as the door to the Court of Dueling Wits swung open, and Ethan and Jade came rushing in.

“Are you okay?” Jade asked. “You're not hurt, are you?”

“Here.” Ethan pressed my inhaler into my hand. “You used up a lot of magic. Use it. Now!”

With my head spinning again, I did as he said and sprayed the inhaler into my mouth. Immediately, strength surged through my veins again, and my eyes widened in surprise. I had been so hyped up by my victory that I hadn't realized just how tired I was. Even after recharging, my arms still felt like noodles, and Splatsy felt like she weighed as much as Brother Humdinger.

“All right,” I said, looking back up at Opisthia. “Tomorrow.”