The Voyage of the Caterpillar

Chapter 8: The Apothecary

My eyes fluttered. What had happened? The last thing I remembered was falling through the air with Trixie beside me....

"Fletcher? Fletcher?" A familiar voice said.

I opened my eyes, almost blinded by the amount of light. It was Trixie.

"Fletcher! You're alright!" She exclaimed.

"Huh? Trixie! What... What happened?"

"I don't know. I do know is that we're trapped on some werid space. It's like an invisible wall- we can see through it but we can't escape."

I took a look around. As far as I was concerned, I could walk anywhere I pleased. I stood up, crawled around, and then oof! I had hit something.

"Didn't see that..." I moaned.

"Told you," Trixie laughed. "We're trapped. Invisible wall."

"But... Why are we trapped here? And where are we?"

"We're not in the forest, that's for sure," Trixie remarked.

This was when I noticed I was someplace strange, and not just in this odd enclosed space. All around there were jars, some colored, some clear, filled with the oddest things.

In one jar, here were dried up leaves. In another, white berries. Another contained flowers. They were making me hungry.

It was the other side of the room that was just plain odd. There was a jar full of red liquid that couldn't be anything but blood, and from another, a bunch of creepy eyeballs. There were quills from a porcupine, fangs from a snake, and wings of bats. These must have come from monsters.

"Wow. It's like we're trapped in a place that stores monster parts, like how the sibling's barn stores tools." I told Trixie.

"Worse than that. They don't just store monster parts. This is a store of monster parts!"

"You mean... They sell these parts?" I was shocked.

"Yup. And I think we're also here... We're also here to be sold!"

Trixie and I stared at each other in shock. Was she right? Were we next?

"Trixie! Fletcher!" From another jar over, i saw to familiar faces- Kingsly and Patil! Now I knew that the strange invisible walls surrounding me were the walls of a jar.

"Kingsly! Patil!" I called and waved.

"Fletcher!" They waved back.

"Where are we?" I asked them. Because we were both inside separate jars, it was hard to hear each other.

The siblings pointed to a sign on the door of the place. It read, "Welcome to the Apothecary."

"What's an Apothecary?" Trixie and I called.

"Hermy says it's a store where they sell ingredients for potions to wizards!"

Wizards! Neat!

"What's a potion?" Trixie asked.

"Hermy says it's magic that wizards do- they take ingredients and head them and grind them and mix them up into a potion. Apparently potions can do things like cure poison and make things fall asleep or wake them up, and even make people forget things!" Patil told us from the jar she was sharing with her brother.

"And... Are we ingredients?" I shuddered.

"Hermy says yes..." Kingsly sighed.

"Where is Hermy?" Trixie asked them.

"He's on the other side of us!" The siblings responded.

"Is he alright?"

"He's okay!"

This was scary. We were trapped inside a jar in an Apothecary, where we were doomed to be sold as potion ingredients. Oh butterfly, please help me!