The Collaboration Files

Things Get Hairy

Hiah! Birch. L here, still hanging, and Liz, you made me chuckle until I died and had to find a loophole in Heaven to get back to Earth and live again.

In other words, nice.

So, guess what!? Lizzy, Jene, and I are making a trailer for TCF, and I hope it to be epic. We already know where to get supplies, so now we're going to film. Expect a video soon!

*Waves excitedly* See you on the other side!

*Jumps from the grassy knoll, sword in hand*

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My stomach still burning from laughing, I climbed to the top of the boat, and pulled a tiny notebook from my pocket, along with a stub of graphite. I began to draw.

"Syd?"

I turned, and saw Lizzy, still half-climbing the ladder, looking at me.

"Ja?"

"Can we talk?"

I scooted to the edge of the cabin's roof, and patted the space beside me. Liz smiled a bit, and sat.

"So watsup?"

"Do you really trust Artemis?"

I sighed. "Not really. But we were about to die, and I had to trust him."

"Do you trust Holly?"

"Yes. She didn't kidnap us, chase us a quarter of the way around the world, or..." I flipped through the story in the pocketbook, and looked back at Lizzy. "Anyway, I trust Holly."

"Butler?"

"Butler reminds me of a canine. Loyal, but fierce. I think he loves Artemis like a son. Maybe I trust him but he's on Artemis's side. I'm on the fence."

"And... There's one last person..."

I stared at her. She turned to stare at the waves.

"Me."

I thought, and I thought. Finally, I spoke.

"I trust you. That's a no-brainer. I guess you're like my sister... But I'm not sure. We met a short time ago, maybe a year and a half, but I rely you wholeheartedly. I-“

That’s when we heard a tap from the floor, or ceiling from whoever was in the cabin. I poked my head upside down into the cabin’s window, and looked at the tapper.

“We have a slight predicament.”

I swung into the room through the window, and looked at Artemis. “Yeah? What?”

“That.” He pointed to a sonar screen, where I could see five carefully blipping green dots. All closing in. “They’re on our tail.”

“Who?”

“Faeries. Smugglers, to be precise,” Holly shoved Artemis away from the captain’s chair, and swerved on the wheel. The boat turned on a hairpin, almost going vertical, and slammed back in the water with a crash. Holly yelled for Butler, and in a minute the manservant was crushed inside the tiny cabin, Jenevieve following. With Liz squished into my chest, and the wall to my back (I’m not really sure there was wall there. Butler may have been occupying that space), Holly twirled on the controls, and the boat sank like a stone. The deck dropped from the cabin’s exterior, floating to the surface of the water, and soon the tiny, now-teardrop-shaped craft was moving along the bottom of the ocean. Yet the green dots on the sonar still blipped toward our position, ever so carefully moving around the vessel, positioning to attack or at least intercept.