“You guys gotta see this,” Chet announced from below.

“It’s orgasmic.”

Walker, never one to walk out on an orgasmic experience, shimmied down the hole and dropped down into the darkness below with a splash. Sonya followed suit after denying Chet’s widespread arms and calling for her to fall into them.

Mouth agape, Walker clicked off his flashlight and stowed it in his pack. The glass-like water that painted the center of the cavern was crowned by stone, dirt, and what even looked like to be vegetation. From his count, at least four other holes lined the cavern walls and punctured the stone to reach for the sky. The water reflected the moonlight that crawled itself in through the holes to create a soft glow that illuminated the cave.

Guided by a force called recklessness, Walker stumbled forward to the grand centerpiece of the room: gargantuan roots that had to be at least one foot in diameter penetrated the ceiling above and clawed themselves to the pool beneath. The roots were a stone’s throw away from copying the Pavilion’s architecture.

Maybe there’s a connection?

He closed the gap to the point where the water had gone from an inch of depth to just over his ankles. However, wet socks were enough to justify his fingers caressing the wood. The expected course, stone-like roots turned out to be pliable tissue that was actually quite fuzzy.

He eyed the roots and followed what could be interpreted as their ascent into the rock ceiling if one was ignorant of the basic physiology of plants. Based on the cracks that emanated around each root trunk that protruded from the ceiling, it had most likely broken through the stone to find…

Water?

Nutrients?

Even ignoring how such a soft wood could break through stone, the question of why it expended the energy to do so gave him pause. While there was water for the assumed tree to drink, why wasn’t this place covered in roots from other trees for the same resource?

“Bro, can you stop caressing the wood and help us find these bad boys?” Walker called out.

Walker let go of the wood to join the others who hovered under the base of another hole that sat adjacent to the left of the one they came out of. Unlike the original hole, however, this one shared a wall with the cavern.

As such, emerald vines and mucus-green sprouts clawed themselves down into the cavern to dip their roots into the cave’s water. There was enough vegetation to cause a bramble effect that emulated a tiny island of green in a sea of grey.

Sonya leaned toward Walker and Chet, “Welting frogs apparently like thick foliage, damp atmosphere, and a nearby shallow water source for successful copulation and fertilization-”

Chet elbowed him and winks.

“To occur. They emerge during…”

Walker peered at her phone.

“During…” Chet continued.

Sonya glared at him, “The page refreshed, and since we are in a cave, I don’t have internet connection.

“A book would come in handy right now is what you are saying then,” Walker commented.

“Do you have a book?”

“No.”

An airy chuckle escaped her lips in spite of her valiant attempts to grumble at him.

Walker allowed himself to chuckle.

The silence that was stiller than the water behind them soon came to pass at the sound of Chet’s boot nudging the vegetation.

Inky blotches shot out of the dull green.

They jumped back in unison.

Quick as a maidenless man at a brothel, Chet began swinging his net near his feet at the frisky beings. With similar speed, Walker had dropped his backpack and unzipped it while Sonya had disappeared behind him. When his hands were enclosed in musky leather, Sonya reappeared with the buckets they had left behind at the entrance.

Fortunately, Chet had actually managed to pin one of them with his net.

Stolen story; please report.

“I think we’ve hit the jackpot,” announced a slightly out-of-breath Chet.

Sonya flashed her light at the net for them to get a better look. Sure enough, as her beam of light landed on the net, the inky blot stopped squirming.

A frog.

“That’s a Welting right?” Chet asked.

Walker squinted at it.

“Think so, they’re supposed to be an inch, inch and a half, and black.”

“Alright, keep the light on it,” Walker instructed as he kneeled, and crab-walked to the frog.

To be honest, he thought it was a myth. But as he cupped the frog in his hands through the net, he had to admit it was working. Sonya’s unbroken beam of light emitting from her flashlight was hypnotizing the frog in place.

Sonya opened up the lid of one of the buckets for Walker to squeeze the little amphibian into the bucket.

Walker let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. Chet squinted around his feet as he shuffled to the group. They stood by the bucket as Sonya checked if it was secure.

None of them had forgotten what these things could actually do.

At first, they set up roles for each of the team members, where Chet would net the frogs, Walker would pick them up, and Sonya would handle the buckets and hypnotize the frogs. However, this was gruelingly slow due to the three of them trying to stay aware of their surroundings. Furthermore, since this was the first of multiple possible vegetation sites for frogs, they all agreed on figuring out a way to speed things up.

Thus, Walker and Chet both tended to netting and retrieving the frogs while Sonya mostly spotted them out and hypnotized them when needed. A skill that constantly surprised both Chet and Walker in its efficiency.

After about twenty frogs and a few bush kicks later, Walker had to say something.

“Okay, how are you doing this?”

Sonya grinned.

“What?” she asked playfully.

Chet placed his hands on his lower back and pushed his pelvis forward to hyperextend his back.

“Ahh, you know what he means,” His voice had lost some of its luster and Walker couldn’t blame him.

While Walker was shorter than Chet, both were tall men, and if he was anything like Walker this was putting a strain on his lower back.

“A good eye helps with firing guns.”

Sonya shrugged.

“If I stay on, I’ll tell you more. Otherwise, let’s keep going.”

After the number of frogs that jumped out from the foliage under this hole, they rotated counterclockwise past where they entered to reveal two more holes with varying foliage underneath. They continued their efforts for close to another hour and a half before both buckets were filled with scampering amphibians.

Sweat coated Walker’s body even through the now chilly cave. It was late in the night. It was cold. But as he reached for the ceiling to let his spine decompress, he didn’t want to be anywhere else.

“Gonna check the other side and see if there’s that rope Sonya mentioned,” Walker announced as he pulled off his gloves and stuffed them in his backpack.

He followed the edge of the cavern pool as he made his way to the final hole at the opposite end of where they entered. Putting even a little distance from the others he was able to discern the sensory information that was filtered out to benefit focus. Sounds such as the tip-tip tap of water trickling surprised him at first. Although Walker guessed that made sense, without some sort of constant flow of water this cavern will have dried long ago.

The question was, how did the cavern drain the water?

His vibrating eardrums and cerebral strain aided his dilated pupils to discern that the water was slipping into the hole he was approaching and sliding off the stygian, eroded boulder underneath.

Walker ran his left hand over the boulder to enjoy its rugged, slimy, texture. He thought it was the darkness of the cavern that gave the boulder, which was easily a foot taller and wider than him, but instead, he found it to be the stone’s actual complexion.

His teeth sparkled in the moonlight as he identified the rope that fell from the opening above. However, it was pinned directly between the boulder and the cavern wall.

Which was… weird.

Walker scratched his scalp with his bandaged hand.

Something with the rope.

Someone was saying something behind him. He ignored them. He was missing something important.

Why was it pinned behind the boulder?

He rubbed the boulder in contemplation. It was much too large to have fallen through the hole. Nor could it have been here before the rope was placed. Maybe the rope was blown between the rock by the wind?

He removed his hand from the stone to wipe away the sweat from his forward.

More talking again, now closer.

Walker’s nose crinkled. If only they would shut up so he could think.

He reached over to tug on the rope.

Nothing, it was stretched taut. Walker gritted his teeth, grabbed the rope with trembling hands, and heaved. The polyester shredded his palms, but they didn’t budge. Slick sweat scratched at his eyes.

He relinquished the rope to wipe his forward again with the back of his bandaged hand this time.

The bandages were soaked, and the healing skin underneath screamed.

He fell to one knee and clawed at the bandages but his left hand simply slid across the bandages. The skin on his left hand felt like it was shrinking and about to pop.

A scream tore through his throat,

The tissue beneath the taut skin of his left hand bulged and spasmed beneath the skin whilst every drop of blood in his right hand was clawing its way up his arm.

He slammed his disobeying arms into the boulder. That felt better. Something different.

Again.

His pupils trembled.

Again.

His heart was in his throat, and he couldn’t breathe.

Again.

His arms collided with air and his body collapsed. Icy water hugged the side of his face. An illuminated root stretched before him. In the sea of grey that stood before him, a cluster of red and white on brown vied for his attention.

He couldn’t hear anything. He heard everything.

Something was moving. No, not something. His body had turned to face the sky. Silver flashed before him. He frowned, trying to focus on what was swinging before his eyes.

A pendulum of a shining eye hung from the neck of an angel.