Forest of Imagination

One More Piece

In books, everything seems to be in slow motion as one of the characters die. In real life, things happen so fast that they have to be bluntly described.

McKenzie fell through the trapdoor. I am sure, even now, that was not an accident no matter how it looked.

I grabbed the whizzing arrow--how, I don't know, but when I examined it it looked exactly like a piece of the trident.

Katie jumped in after McKenzie. Who'd have known that Katie was about to sacrifice herself for McKenzie?

The top of the cave blew off, revealing the full moon (and scaring Katie to death).

All the Royal Killers fell to the ground.

Katie started transforming.

Katie stopped transforming and instead was human again.

Katie fell through the trapdoor when the colonel kicked her accidentally while he was falling.

I saw Trinity being pulled out of the water and grabbing a floating piece of drift-metal (not driftwood).

I didn't even have enough time to register what was happening before I, too, fell into that darned trapdoor.

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IN THE OCEAN, TWO HOURS LATER

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"I told you, Katie: it's morning, one, and two, ONE WRONG TURN AND WE END UP IN THE FREAKING OCEAN!" McKenzie screeched. "SO NO NEED TO BE SCARED ABOUT THAT DARN FULL MOON ANYMORE, NOW YOU HAVE TO BE WORRIED ABOUT DROWNING BECAUSE YOUR BEST FRIEND CARMEL URGED YOU TO LEARN TO SWIM AND YOU REFUSED!" In my opinion, I thought McKenzie was overreacting because she could definitely save herself with one single air bubble around her. I guess that after I told her Katie almost died jumping in front of her, TO SAVE HER, McKenzie felt a little more overprotective about everyone.

But yes, we were floating and almost drowning in the "freaking ocean." As my friend McKenzie so kindly pointed out. How we got here, I had no idea, because hadn't Trinity went through the trapdoor all fine?

My head went underwater, and I tried making an air bubble. Then I realized that I wasn't in mermaid form. I guess that I was on land for so long now, I'd almost forgotten that I could become a mermaid, if I was in the water. Of course, in the water I could also stay in human form, but I usually choose not to.

OK, I knew we had to have done something wrong, because we did actually fall onto regular land at first. But then Katie stepped into a stupid magic portal, accidentally, that was hidden in the jasmine flowers (set up probably by the Royal Killers). She pushed me while falling, and then I accidentally slipped on McKenzie's fake legs (which was luckily saved from the caves by moi, yours truly), which made her fall into that problematic portal.

Ugh, that stupid portal was a dumb trap and the reason why we were in the middle of the ocean.

"Ugh," Katie said, splashing McKenzie in the face.

"Hey!" McKenzie cried.

"You deserved it! I didn't mean to trip on that stupid gnome, which I thought was a flower," Katie complained.

"The most popular girl at Charlotte's school, thinking a gnome was a flower?" I asked in disbelief, surfacing from the ocean and still human, treading seawater the best that I could.

"What? It was purple," Katie said defensively, which didn't help at all.

"So what?" I said, angry.