BALAN WONDERWORLD REDUX

Chapter 2 part 1: A Farm and a Farmer

Lance, Fighter, and Streetbeat all walked into the portal and found themselves in a huge grassy field. Fighter's eyes were sparkling in wonder.

"Wooooaahh. I've never seen corn this big!"

The crops were all the sizes of double-decker busses. They towered over the three as they were wandering through the corn maze. After a while of walking around aimlessly, running into swarms of crops that they couldn't pass through, Streetbeat grew impatient.

"Do we even know where we're going?" Streetbeat said with a tired tone of voice. "Lance, how do you not know your way through here?"

Lance turned with a nervous expression on his face, as though he was afraid he would look uncool.

"The thing is little one..." Lance began to say hesitantly "I can only enter a stage through select areas...that's because I'm not technically in charge of this stage, so my access is a bit limited. You hadn't set any entry parameters in your stage, so I could enter wherever..."

Streetbeat was in disbelief, he'd thought that things would've been fine if they just stuck with Lance, but now he was feeling a bit nervous about their excursion.

"Why didn't you tell us earlier?!" Streetbeat was concerned, but Fighter was still too amazed to mind much.

"I was going to, but it slipped my mind...I'm sorry." Lance looked down at the floor, disappointed in himself for letting Streetbeat and Fighter down.

Streetbeat looked at Lance after he'd finished steaming off and figured he'd been a bit harsh. He was the Maestro of the Wonderworld, so it makes sense that when two people suddenly decide to come with him, it would kind of hamper things.

"Well, it's fine, It still looks pretty cool. Who lives here anyway?"

"You'll meet them soon enough," Lance said with a calm tone of voice. "I'm sorry it has to be such a drawn-out experience but we're almost there. I can sense them"

Streetbeat gave Lance a look. "Can I trust you on that?"

"Surely!" Lance says with brimming confidence.

"Well, I think this place is really cool!" Emma says, jumping around the field with enthusiasm.

Finally, they reach the end of the maze. They're greeted with a lovely red farm, sitting high on a hill with big, beautiful sunflowers planted on either side of it.

"Wooow." Streetbeat and Fighter were both quite impressed at the sight. It was as if he was staring at a window's background theme. The three start making their way up the hill, passing by a whole bunch of Negati squandering around the field.

Fighter looked left and right, only to find vegetables and Negati getting drops off of them. "Looks like they're in everybody's stages..."

"Quite," Lance said. This startled Fighter because she'd thought no one heard her. "They exist all over."

"I wonder what they are..." Streetbeat thought.

At the top of a hill, they found a man in plaid and a purple-haired girl with glasses sitting at an outdoor table with a shaded parasol set near the barn entrance.

"Hello?" Lance calls out to them.

The girl looks over as the man tips his straw hat up and they smile towards Lance.

"Lance! It's good to see ya!" The man walks up to Lance with the girl and down the barn steps.

"Yeah! we were wondering when you were gonna get back. We were just talking about bug fights and the natural prey and predators of Mantises"