Mr.FORTISQUE

Chapter-5

The First Task

When I got there, Amanda and Scorpius were already yelling at each other. Earlier today at school, I had asked them both to meet me at the park to discuss about the mysterious map. Their conversation was something like-"Chocolate on top of ice cream is THE BEST" said Amanda. Scorpius replied,"Have you gone nuts Am? Vanilla syrup makes much more sense! Everyone likes Vanilla! You are the only annoying person who hates vanilla. Apparently they were having a debate on which flavoured syrup tastes better on top of strawberry icecream-the ultimate chocolate or the classic vanilla. I put an abrupt end to the absurd debate .

We sat down on the lawn and I told them about the bizzare things that have been happening over the past few days. Amanda's mouth was hanging wide open and she was staring at me without blinking. Scorpius' face was blank. Like super blank. They didn't believe any of it until I showed them the map. Amanda suggested that we go through the cookbook again. So I got the cookbook out of my bag and we three started looking at every page even more closely. Except a diamond like symbol on the upper left corner of the "Jammy Berry Pies" recipe page, we found nothing. I wiped my glasses and looked at the diamond more closely hoping to find a clue about all this.I remembered seeing this diamond somewhere. And then it striked- it was my great grand mom's locket. It was shaped like a diamond. I shrieked and with Amanda and Scorpius, we rushed to my house.

We took the locket from my desk and compared its shape to that of the symbol. The locket looked exactly like the symbol. We got super exhilarated. But there was this problem. We couldn't open the locket. It had a small keyhole and we didn't have a locket key. Wondering what to do, we had a look at the cookbook once again. The map! But what was it there for? "Hey, maybe the map leads to the key!" said Scorpius. The map wasn't very clear. Just a simple sketch of three trees and a cross near it. We were all really tired of thinking about all this.

We decided to take a break-that is, to do our school homework. That was when Amanda screamed."I left my school bag at the park!" So we strolled back to the park and found Amanda's backpack. We decided to go back to our own homes. When we were about to exit the park, I remembered. Near the place where Amanda left her bag, stood three trees. We decided to take a look once again. The trees stood exactly in the triangle way- like the ones in the map. I got excited and started digging up. But Amanda said, "There is no point in randomly digging up this entire spot. We have to find the exact cross marked place." The map showed the cross two metres away from the first tree, to the Southwest. We didn't know the exact direction. "I have a compass in my pencil box" said Scorpius. We then followed the compass.

Finally, we managed to find the right spot- two metres Southwest from the first tree. We started digging up like crazy in the urge to find treasure. My finger just then smashed into something hard- we found a rusty old steel box. It was so old that the entire box was brown instead of steel. We looked at each other in awe. I could feel the thrill up my nerves. We opened it slowly (the lid came off while doing so) and to our amazement, found a really tiny little rusty key. We did it. Completed our what- could- probably be-first task.

Yours victoriously,
Sheldon Fortisque