Chapter 6: The Birds and the Bees and Bartholemew
“Puddle and Glow were the first people I met when I got here,” Amy explained as the three of them sat around the table in the middle of her workshop, the skeleton of a robot lying in front of them like a body on an operating table or the least appetizing Thanksgiving meal Cecily had ever seen.
Amy went on, “Puddle was kind, but whenever I talked to him about trying to get home he shut down and became entirely unhelpful. He didn’t like it when I talked about Earth around Glow either. Glow loved me, though. She was always finding me and asking me to tell her stories.”
“She does that to us, too,” August told her with a smile. “She teleports into our house almost every day and tries to play with us or asks me for stories.”
Amy smiled and cocked her head at him. “That’s cute that she still loves stories! I haven’t seen her in years. What kinds of stories do you usually tell?”
Cecily was a bit confused about the timeline–if Amy arrived six years ago, Glow must have been a newborn–but then again, maybe newborns talked here. August didn’t seem concerned by the oddity. “Well, we haven’t told either of them we’re from Earth yet,” he said, “so I mostly just make up stories for her.”
“You’re probably more creative than me,” Amy chuckled. “Since I couldn’t talk about Earth, I would just tell the plots of TV shows I’d seen. She really liked Gravity Falls, but I’d only seen the first season, so I didn’t have a lot to go off there. Is that one still going? I remember it being really clever for a kids show.”
“It’s… not,” August told her regretfully. There was a short silence as they all contemplated the loss, then Amy shook her head and perked up.
“I forgot what we were talking about for a second. I’m telling you what I know about Puddle, right?”
“I think that’s where we were going with this,” Cecily agreed, realizing that their new friend might be even more scatterbrained than either of them.
Amy nodded. “Right. So, the whole situation with Puddle not wanting to talk about Earth was a little offputting, but I didn’t really get suspicious until I started tracking the trees.”
“Tracking them how?” Cecily asked.
“I’m sure you’ve noticed that some of the trees move every night, right?” Amy asked, and Cecily and August nodded. “Well, I wanted to see where they went and if there was a pattern to it. I figured that the more I could understand about how this world works, the better my chances of getting out of it.”
Cecily had always assumed the trees had just disappeared and reappeared in different places; she had never considered that they might actively move. Amy may be scatterbrained, but she’s way better at being lost in a magical world than we are, she thought with growing respect.
“Was there a pattern?” August asked, and Amy nodded with a smile.
“I marked several trees and followed them each night. As it turns out, half of the trees don’t move, but enough of them do that it changes the appearance of the forest pretty significantly every time. The moving trees always stay still during the day, so I would sleep when they did and then move all night. They didn’t follow a direct path and seemed to be meandering aimlessly, but I kept following them for two weeks and realized that they were all moving away from Puddle’s house. I tested the theory a few times and no matter which direction the trees were moving, it was always away from Puddle.” She looked at the twins expectantly.
“Okay…” August said slowly. “So, the trees move away from Puddle. Is that problematic?”
Amy waved her wrench aimlessly. “On its own, not really. But there are other clues.” She looked at them very seriously. “Have you two ever wondered where new people come from?”
August flushed. “We’re twenty years old, Amy. We know the birds and the bees.”
Amy shook her head. “No, I mean where people come from in this world.”
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“It’s… different?” Cecily asked hesitantly, not sure how much detail she wanted about this particular topic.
“I honestly don’t know the mechanics of reproduction here; I haven’t figured out how to research that,” Amy admitted, unfazed. “What I’m referring to is the fact that there are no children around here.”
“I did notice that!” Cecily jumped in excitedly. “I’ve only met one other person that looks around our age, and no one younger than us.” And I haven’t seen her since, she thought, looking at her ugly locket and thinking of Ravioli Girl.
“Except Glow,” August reminded her, and Amy pointed at him.
“Exactly, August!” she paused. “How much have you guys explored this world since you’ve been here?”
“Not much,” Cecily admitted. “We’ve been a little preoccupied with trying to stay alive and get home, so we haven’t had much time for sightseeing.”
Amy looked thoughtful for a moment. “Would you like to take a field trip? I want to show you something.”
Amy took them to the back of the large workshop and opened what Cecily realized was the back door of the house. Amy then walked to the corner, where a bright green electric scooter was leaning against the wall. “Where did you get that?” Cecily asked with confusion. It looked just like the kind that were scattered around busy cities, available to rent by the mile for people who were too lazy to walk. Cecily had always liked the idea of those scooters: how you could just use it as long as you wanted, then leave it on the sidewalk for someone else to deal with.
Amy chuckled as she wheeled the scooter out the door, gesturing for the twins to follow. “I was actually riding it when I arrived in this world, so it’s one of my only souveniers from Earth. I’ve had to get creative about how to recharge the battery, but it’s still functional even after all this time!” She patted the handlebars of the scooter like a well-behaved dog. “My noble steed. I call him Bartholomew!”
Of course you do, Cecily thought with a small smile. Amy had her quirks, but at least they were human quirks instead of whatever the people here had going on. Amy shut the door of her house and stepped onto the scooter. “It will be a tight fit, but if we all cram together on this, we’ll get there way faster than walking,” she announced. Cecily got on behind her, and August brought up the rear, the three of them barely able to fit on Bartholomew’s narrow board.
Clasping her arms around Amy and feeling August holding onto her, Cecily felt a brief, beautiful moment of normalcy. We should rent one of these scooters when we get back, Cecily thought. We should do a lot of things when we get back.
She felt August’s arms tighten around her as the scooter started moving bumpily over the grass. “So, how did you end up on Earth?” August called up to Amy, his voice bouncing from the movement of the wheels.
“Well, I still don’t know why it happened,” Amy called back, “but I was feeling in a weird rut one day. You know, dissatisfied with my job, feeling a sense of monotony. It wasn’t anything new, but I felt the need to get out of the house and do something different, so I rented one of these scooters and just started riding around downtown. At one point I went through a park, but somewhere in the middle of the park, the trees started getting a lot thicker, then started changing colors. After a while, I realized that I’d been going way longer than I should have been able to go in that small park, so I turned around, but couldn’t find my way back.” She shrugged, and Cecily felt the movement in her own body pressed up against Amy’s back. “I had just scootered right into another world, and I’ve been here ever since.”
They abruptly jerked to a stop as Bartholomew’s front wheel got stuck on a root. They all got off and let Amy reposition the scooter before remounting and continuing forward. They were in the forest now, but there was a thin path that looked well worn by Amy and her scooter. They were heading in the opposite direction from Cecily and August’s house, toward an area that Cecily had never been before.
“So, how did you two end up here?” Amy asked. “Was it a similar situation?”
“Yes and no,” Cecily started, wishing she could see August’s face behind her. “It was more–”
The sound of flapping wings interrupted Cecily and she looked up to see Bright flyingjust above the treeline, like a harbinger of death for good moods and self-esteem. She heard August groan and couldn’t argue with that sentiment.
“Hey, Bright!” Amy yelled up to him. “I’m taking the Weavers to the river!”
If the winged sadist replied, it was too quiet to hear, but he gave an enormous flap of his great black wings and accelerated ahead of them, giving a piercing glare to the twins as he left them behind.
“I actually met Bright on the other side of the river,” Amy told the twins, apparently forgetting that she had asked them a question. “I stayed over there for a few years when I was still trying to figure out what was going on in this place.”
They were making good time now that the scooter had found its rhythm, and Cecily was pretty sure Amy had made some kind of adjustment to make it faster than it was supposed to be. There were a lot of quesitons Cecily still wanted to ask, but they were overshadowed by the anticipation of whatever was coming. The trees loomed large and multicolored over her head as they rode forward in silence for a few minutes, then came to a screeching halt.
“Well,” Amy said as she dismounted from Bartholemew and took in the scene before them. “That’s unusual.”