Chapter 9: One Man’s Trash Panda is Another Man’s Treasure

The Roombas were closing in. They were surprisingly quiet, perhaps due to the fact that the vacuum feature had been replaced with long knives that spun with the Roombas, right at the perfect height to stab Cecily in the heart or Puddle in the lower abdomen.

Puddle stood in front of Cecily and August and turned to face the robots. “You two should get out of here,” he told them. “Glow is inside Seed’s shop. Would you help me out and get her home while I take care of these?”

“You brought Glow?” Amy interrupted. “How can she cross back and forth over the river?” Cecily had the same question after everything she’d learned that day, but she was a little more concerned about the robots barrelling toward them.

“Amy, let’s not discuss this right now,” Puddle sighed as the robots finally reached him. Cecily let out a yelp as Puddle reached a hand out toward the spinning knives, but instead of getting shredded like a fork in the garbage disposal, Puddle’s hand closed impossibly fast around the short hilt of the knife that attached it to the robot. He held it in place as the robot stuttered to keep rotating, then cleanly snapped the knife off and dropped it to the ground, smashing the top of the machine with his other fist at the same time. The robot started to smoke and began rotating much more slowly with its two remaining knives while the other two Roombas closed in on Puddle’s left and right.

“Come on, let’s go,” Amy said, turning to the twins. “We don’t want to be caught in the crosshairs of this fight.”

“You’re just going to sic robots on our neighbor and leave him?” August demanded, looking as close to angry as Cecily had ever seen the mild-mannered English major. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I know this is not okay! We have to help Puddle!” Cecily didn’t know how to feel about Amy’s personal crusade to make the inside of the river more sensible, but she knew she didn’t want to see Puddle get minced, so she nodded in agreement.

Amy frowned. “First of all, Puddle will be fine. I’m still experimenting with the robots and that man is a beast. I get it, though. You guys are still trying to find meaning here, and that’s okay. You know where to find me when you give up.” She turned to run back toward the woods and the river, pausing. “Actually, do you think you guys could…” She shook her head. “Nevermind, I’ll ask Bright to pick it up later.” Then she took off home, leaving Cecily confused and angry.

“She was really going to ask us to get her meds for her?” Cecily exclaimed, folding her arms. “Typical. I finally find another normal person from Earth and she turns out to be an egotistical philosopher with no social skills.”

“We have bigger problems right now, Silly!” August yelled, pulling her back as Puddle smashed another Roomba, sending bits of metal flying. No social skills, and killer robots, Cecily thought. Puddle seemed to be winning the fight, but all three Roombas were still functional, albeit damaged. August looked around frantically. “There has to be something we can do to help!”

Cecily felt Ravioli Girl’s locket bounce against her chest. She was only supposed to open it in an emergency, and she decided this qualified. “I have something that might work,” she told August, stepping back and gripping the locket. It felt warm in her hands and she fumbled with the silver clasp for a moment before opening it. What’s it going to do? She wondered eagerly. A spell, a weapon?

In a burst of gray light, a shape leaped from the locket onto the ground in front of Cecily, then turned and hissed at her. “A raccoon?” Cecily said, staring at the animal on the ground. “A freaking raccoon?” The feral raccoon that had been living in her necklace stared back, then hissed at her again.

“Maybe it’s trained to attack!” August suggested helpfully. “Raccoon, get the robots!” He pointed at the Roombas, but the raccoon just hissed again and began trundling off away from the noise.

Cecily yelled in frustration. “If I ever see that witch again, I’m going to–”

“Watch out!” Puddle yelled as one of the Roombas went spinning out of control and narrowly missed slicing Cecily’s arm. “I asked you two to get Glow and get out of here! Please!”

“He’s right,” August said, grabbing Cecily’s wrist and pulling her toward Seed’s house. “We’ll only get in his way out here, but we can make sure Glow is safe.” They started to run, and Cecily saw Puddle hit one robot hard enough to break it in half. He’s done this before, she remembered. The huge man’s face was completely calm as he continued destroying the robots, which hadn’t even put a scratch on him yet.

The raccoon had disappeared, but as Cecily closed the locket, it gave the same flash of gray light it had when she had opened it and she heard a hiss as the light vanished. Did it just suck the raccoon back in? she thought with an inward groan. Of course the raccoon is a permanent fixture.

Cecily and August reached Seed’s house and ran inside. Seed was standing at one of the big windows, their face pressed to the glass as they tried to watch the scene taking place several yards away. Glow was sitting in a chair by the fire, holding onto the seat of it with her hands. As Cecily watched, the little girl teleported across the room, appearing a few feet in the air and still holding onto the chair, which fell to the ground with a loud thud. Glow shrieked with laughter, then repeated the process twice before noticing the twins.

“August!” she yelled, teleporting to August but forgetting to let go of the chair. The chair’s leg landed squarely on August’s foot and Cecily heard him inhale sharply with pain. Glow hopped down from the chair and kicked it to the side, then looked up at August eagerly.

“Are you here to tell me some stories?” she asked, her purple eyes wide.

“No, we’re actually here to take you home,” August answered, his voice a little strained from the pain in his foot.

Glow smiled, then her dark eyebrows creased. “What about Da? Is he coming home too?”

“He’ll catch up,” Cecily said, hoping to get moving soon. “In fact,” she added, an idea suddenly occurring, “he told us to race him home! Do you think we can beat him there?”

Glow’s smile lit up her face. “Yeah!” she exclaimed, then vanished in thin air.

Cecily let out a breath. “Shit. I forgot she could do that.” She shrugged at August. “Hopefully she went straight home?”

There was a particularly loud crash outside and Seed finally looked away from the window. “Perhaps you should follow her lead,” they suggested.

“It would be nice to get back,” August agreed, looking way too tired for late afternoon. Cecily couldn’t blame him, though–she felt like it had been days since they heard “Call Me Maybe” on the way home from the market. “I just hope Glow stays put until we get there.”

Barely two seconds later, Glow reappeared in front of them, her face set in a pout. “I got bored,” she said.

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“Glow, buddy, you were gone for less than a minute,” August said, reaching out a hand to her. “Your attention span is incredible.”

“What’s an attention span?” Glow asked, holding his hand.

August thought for a moment. “It’s how long you can have one thought in your head before switching to something else.”

“Oh, I have a lot of thoughts in my head,” Glow said seriously, widening her eyes at him. “A lot.”

Cecily just snorted at the overly serious child, but August chuckled nervously. “I bet you do, Glow. Now come on, let’s go home.”

“I have a back door you can use,” Seed offered, then led the three of them through the house and out a door in the back, which faced directly toward the treeline that August and Cecily had come from.

“Do you actually know how to get home from here?” Cecily asked August, who shook his head.

“I’m hoping we can find the scooter trail Amy took and just follow that back the way we came. There’s also a good chance Puddle will catch up to us while we’re still walking.”

Glow gasped. “No! We can’t let Da win the race!” She started to run, pulling August behind her. Glow was surprisingly fast for someone with such short legs, and Cecily struggled to keep up. By the time they reached the trees, though, Glow had gotten tired and slowed down.

Cecily finally caught her breath, but Glow didn’t let them rest for long. “Tell me a story!” she ordered, still holding August’s hand.

Cecily could tell August was about to comply, but she felt like this situation needed a little “bad cop.” “Glow, we’re tired and we’ve had a long day. What if August doesn’t want to tell you a story right now?”

Glow’s mouth dropped open in horror. “He doesn’t want to tell me a story?”

“No, I’ll tell you a story,” August said obligingly. “But I do want you to say ‘please’ first.”

Glow let go of August’s hand so she could clasp her hands together. “Pleeeeease?” she asked, her eyes somehow looking even bigger than usual.

“Okay,” he replied, shooting a reassuring smile at Cecily. “I’m fine, I have fun with these stories,” he whispered to her.

“Once upon a time there were these giant creatures called dinosaurs,” he said to Glow, who took his hand again as they continued walking. “They had scales and were as big as a house! One day, one of the dinosaurs woke up and can you guess what was missing?”

“Asteroid protection?” Cecily suggested and August gave her a withering look.

Glow shook her head. “What was missing?”

“His tail!” August exclaimed. “His tail was completely gone! So, he started to look for it…”

The story continued as most children’s stories do, with various innocuous mishaps occurring to the dinosaur, who Glow decided was named Piz. Another great example of why kids shouldn’t be in charge of anything.

Cecily felt a slight pang as she watched August interact with Glow. He was the anxious one, yet somehow everything came naturally to him: storytelling, talking with kids and adults alike, making friends in a cooky magical world. Cecily had thought she finally had a chance to do at least one of those things when they met Amy, but it seemed she’d been foiled in that, too. Even her stupid locket had turned out to be useless. She remembered their high school English teacher’s reaction when August had decided to go to college: “You’ll thrive wherever you’re planted,” she’d told him, then turned to Cecily and all she could offer was, “You’ll find your place someday.” Stupid Mrs. Baxter.

They reached the river and Cecily crossed first, then watched as August and Glow stepped over it together. Nothing happened, and Glow continued forward as if the river was just a trickle of water. Which, as Cecily considered it, it very well might be.

“Do you think the whole river thing is a trick?” she asked August when he had a break from talking to Glow. “What if it isn’t magical at all but people don’t try to cross because they think it is?”

August thought. “That would explain why it didn’t do anything to Glow just now, but do you really think no one else would have tried for generations?”

Cecily shrugged. “I dunno. People here are weird.”

“Am I weird?” asked Glow, who was apparently listening.

Cecily patted her on the head. “You might be the weirdest little freak I’ve ever met.”

August was aghast. “Silly!”

“I’m using ‘freak’ as a term of endearment!” Cecily said innocently, and Glow just giggled, clearly unoffended. “Hey, look, a change of topic!” Cecily continued, pointing at a trail of flattened grass to their right. “I think that’s the path we took on the way here! It looks like scooter tracks, anyway.”

“Lovely. Good thing your eyes are better than your word choice,” August replied, rerouting Glow to walk along the path. His face brightened. “Do you think the kittens are still there?”

“Ugh, I hope not.” Cecily grimaced at the memory of the adorable yet terrifying kittens that had seemed determined to eat her.

“Pfft. You’re just jealous because they liked me more.”

After a few minutes, they reached the deep rut that had been home to said kittens, but it was blessedly empty. There were huge cat tracks in the dirt leading away from the rut, with a few crushed bushes and one tree that looked like it had been used as a back-scratching post before being left bent and mangled. “Wonderful, they’re loose in the forest,” Cecily sighed. “At least that’s a problem for later.” I’ll add it to the list.

After another hour or so of walking, during which Glow alternated between being extremely talkative and so lethargic that August had to carry her like a sack of potatoes, they reached the clearing that held Amy’s house. There were no signs of activity, but Cecily figured there was a good chance Amy was home after fleeing the action earlier, so they skirted around it and found the beaten path that led them back home.

When they arrived at their house, Cecily immediately walked to the couch and faceplanted on it. August joined her a few seconds later. “Glow is jumping on the bed,” he told her. “That should buy us two to three minutes of peace.”

Cecily groaned, her face still in the couch cushions. “What the hell just happened? We finally met another person from Earth, but instead of helping us all get home she would rather try to annihilate Puddle. And on top of everything else, it turns out Ravioli Girl is as deranged as everyone else we’ve met here, so she probably won’t be as much help as I’d thought.” Cecily turned her body so she could take off the locket and drop it on the ground. She could have sworn she heard a faint growl come from it as it hit the wood floor.

August sat on the ground and leaned his back against the couch. “Any ideas on what to do from here? I have no clue.”

“All I know is that I don’t want to stick around to see how this all plays out,” Cecily decided, sitting up. “We need to redouble our efforts to get home! Now that we know Amy was brough here, too, there’s a good chance there were other people in the past. We can ask around and try to figure out if any of them are still here or if they found a way home.”

August raised his eyebrows. “You’re saying we should go meet more people?”

“This is not the time to gloat, August. I’m not saying we need friends, I’m just saying that the more people we can get to help with this, the better our chances of success.”

“But what should we do about Amy in the meantime?”

Cecily shrugged as well as she could while laying sideways on the couch. “Nothing. As long as she doesn’t bother us with her weird mission, I think we can just leave her out of things until we find a way home, then we can offer to bring her with us if she wants to leave.” August frowned, and Cecily could practically see his moral compass spinning out of control in his head. “It’s not like we could do much to help Puddle,” she pointed out, trying to calm him down. “We’re not really in robot-fighting shape, and he’s able to handle himself pretty well.”

A loud knock sounded at the door, and Cecily sat up. “Speak of the devil, that’s probably him!”

“Can we not call Puddle the devil right now? It feels wrong in the current climate,” August said, standing and going to the door. Cecily followed, watching as August opened the door to reveal not Puddle, but Bright.

“Good afternoon. At least, it was until I had to look at you again,” Bright whispered, dropping a basket with a bag of flour and a loaf of bread on the floor at August’s feet. Cecily considered releasing her raccoon on him.

“Bright? What are you doing here?” Puddle’s voice came from behind the winged boy, and Cecily saw him approaching the door as well.

With a squeal of excitement, Glow also materialized in the hallway and Cecily remembered why she had been so reluctant to meet people before.

“Immediate regret,” Cecily muttered, considering releasing the raccoon on herself. She’d take potential rabies over whatever this was.

“Well,” the ever-polite August said after a moment, “would you all like to come in?”