The Early Mission [COMPLETED]

13: The Last Clue (technically it's the first but meh)

River

I had a theory.

And I was this close to figuring things out until everything went wrong.

But let me start from the beginning.

Things continued to happen after Rover's mom decided that Rover and I would not be going on the mission. For one, Ivy was left alone so our teachers Helen and Argus decided that we wouldn't be going on the mission at all. And instead of us going on the mission, it would be another group of cadets, from another island. It annoyed me. I didn't want another bunch of cadets going on the mission for us. Argus said that we would still be doing a lot of work as the mission control, but it didn't reassure me.

So the next day, I decided to do some work on my own. Because training was off. And I had a theory. So I was off to find out if it was true.

I left headquarters in the afternoon. I decided it would be best if I went at daytime because I could go closer to the more dangerous areas of Hummingbird Peak without encountering the dodo birds. (Author: man, I'm getting tired of that name.) I carried a book that I had fetched from the restricted area of the library (don't tell anyone. I need it for my top-secret detective work.)

Since the day our teachers introduced the mission to us, I had done fair enough research on this case to know that there was more to this case than what people usually said. We grew up knowing the dangerous birds as monsters that take our children away if we're not careful. But not everything everyone said was true. At least, not when it came to children. 

And especially not when it came to the claim that the dodo birds were cannibals.

Not if my theory was correct.

I know nobody else would agree with me with this theory. But I don't care. I do.

If my theory was correct, everyone that the dodo birds took is still here, alive.

Which meant that... Rover's little brother...

Yeah. He's alive. It's a crazy theory - more of a fact than a theory, really, - but I wasn't telling Rover.

Yes, I wasn't telling him even if it involved his little brother. Especially because it involved his little brother. Not because I cared about it. I didn't care about him at all.

And it wasn't just Rover's little Robin that was lost to the dodo birds. There had been many more cases in the past. We'd all heard about the case of a cadet in the early 1900s, Dotty Eagle, from the Eagle family, who died saving a life.

My dedication to prove the theory was much more of a tribute to her than anything else.

The part of the forest that I went to was pretty clear, and there was no sign of any living things except for the trees. I wished myself good luck and entered, and headed for the moss-grown stone structure. I wasn't planning to go too far in.

I could see the stone structure that I had been looking for exactly. It looked less like a structure from far away, but now that I was closer I could see more clearly. It resembled the head of an eagle. It was old and broken. Below it was a circle cut out of the stone and put back into place. What was on the circle was what surprised me...

...because I knew exactly what it was. A spiral symbol with two lines in the middle was supposed to be the symbol of the birds that haunted our island. I stood from the distance and didn't dare go closer. It was strange, I thought it was supposed to be hard to find it. I thought it was a secret.

Then it got suddenly dark and I dropped the book, and I knew I was in trouble. Silhouettes started to appear all around, and I was grabbed from the side.