Draconics

Chapter 10

It's a little known fact that glowplant juice, while goopy, sticky, and gross, makes whatever it covers invisible until it wears off after a few hours.

When Tycho and I first broke open some glowplant stalks and dumped their juice over Meecha and Ryan, they both got really mad.

"What was that for?!" Ryan demanded. "We're supposed to be working together!"

"NOT cool Tycho, I just took a bath yesterday!" Meecha growled.

They seemed confused, though, when we dumped some over ourselves. They looked at each other and realized they were invisible and finally understood what happened.

"Oh, I get it now!" Ryan said. Meecha still seemed upset about getting dirty.

The plan was pretty obvious from there. We had no trouble sneaking past Nokomis, who was questioning every dragon she came across, and flying back home was even easier. I landed in my backyard, ran inside, and ran to my room. I grabbed the necklace out of its hiding spot and shoved it in my pocket, then ran back out to the others. 

"I got it!" I whispered, and we quietly high-fived to show we were all still there. Then we took off, heading back to our hiding spot. Once or twice I worried one of them might actually be Nokomis pretending to be them, but when we reached the Dragon Hills I saw Nokomis sitting on a rock eating a sapphire angrily. I tried not to laugh.

When we reached our cave, I told everyone the glowplant would wash off in water. After a short swim we were all visible again, and thankfully no one turned out to be Nokomis. I picked up my book, which I had left here while we went to get the necklace, and opened it up, searching for a page.

"What'cha doin' now?" Tycho asked.

"I borrowed this book from Mom. It's about enchanted jewelry." I replied, still flipping pages.

"Seems like the kind of book she'd have." Ryan said. 

"And it's certainly a good book to figure out if the necklace is enchanted too....... aha!" I said, finding the right page. "It's a test for identifying enchantments!"

Meecha frowned.

"What if it's not enchanted though? It could be cursed, or a capture charm." she said.

"A capture......charm?" Ryan asked.

"It's a..... well...... uh...... it's basically a boobytrapped pendant, bead, or charm on a necklace, I don't know a lot about them." Tycho said.

"Wait, boobytrapped?" I asked.

"Yeah, it captures.... someone...... that's it! The orbs the dragons on the necklace are holding must be capture charms!" Tycho said, practically shouting with excitement.

"The apprentices must have gotten captured by the necklace! That's why Tycho smelled frozen draconics and Nokomis wants it so badly! She doesn't want anyone to free them!" Ryan shouted.

Suddenly I heard the flapping of wings like someone was flying down the tunnels.

"Nokomis must've heard!" Tycho whispered.

"Really? Her hearing is that good?" I asked, whispering as well.

"Some species of dragons have amazing hearing." Meecha whispered matter of factly.

"Well maybe we should hide then. You know, because we're just standing here?!" Ryan whipered, then ran into a patch of glowplant by the water and crouched. He must've broken a glowplant stalk as well, because he vanished completely. I ran to another patch, crouched, and poured glowplant juice on myself, and Tycho and Meecha did the same. Then Nokomis burst into the cavern.