Kipo watched the little screen with baited breath, and when the newcomer merperson finally dropped the flowers in the boat, she breathed a sigh of relief. The screen went dark.
"...It worked," Kipo whispered, relieved. Gale gave her a look.
"Don't tell me that was actually your plan," he huffed. "You got incredibly lucky here. Next time won't be so easy, you know."
"Huh," was all Kipo said in reply. Yeah, he was probably right. Her idea fell apart on the second term. If not for the whale providing a threat, and her using the eagle to her advantage (to Gale's chagrin. He had tried to argue with her, that the eagle was meant to 'carry an opponent away from the battlefield', but Kipo had argued right back that there was no reason she couldn't use the eagle like this. Eventually, thankfully, Gale gave in, grumbling), then they probably wouldn't have won.
Kipo frowned. She'd have to be more careful in the future. Still...
"They're safe now, right?" Kipo asked, leaning forward. Gale sniffed.
"Safe enough. The battle is over now; they don't need for you to hold their hand to get them back to land, do they?"
Kipo rolled her eyes, but she didn't push it anymore.
"Who are you going to next?" Gale questioned her, and before them, the screen lit up again. Now, the soft light was split into three sections, one showing Kris and Mabel, another Kai, Mira and Tulip, and the last Fei Fei and Anne. Kipo blinked down at it as she thought. All this... was messing with her head.
She was up here to protect her real life friends from real life danger, but the way Gale was presenting it, it seemed like a tabletop board game. A common theme with Gale, it seemed.
"In the end, it doesn't really matter, does it?" Kipo spoke, but Gale didn't answer. Not like it was really a question. "I'll help Fei Fei and Anne. Where are they going, again?"
Gale suddenly seemed smug. "Oh, don't worry. It's a place you know very well."
The screen changed, going black before it once again lit up, showing Anne and Fei Fei standing side by side, looking up at something. Kipo's eyes widened.
"...Huh."
"...Huh."
Both Anne and Fei Fei had the same look on their faces, but they wouldn't know, because they never looked at each other. Instead, their eyes were fixed on the unfathomable colossal things before them.
"I..." Anne gulped, and then tried again. "Uh... wow."
"These... they must go up to outer space," Fei Fei decided. There was no way they didn't at least graze the edge of the atmosphere. She raised a hand, pressing it against the trunk of a tree. It was real, very much so. "Amazing."
Something pink tired to reach out and grab her, but Fei Fei quickly snatched her hand back. She blinked. She hadn't even noticed the pink fog swirling around the forest, swirling in and out between every tree, like a sea of sparkling pink.
Anne didn't seem to have noticed.
"This place is amazing," she said, and Fei Fei grimaced in disagreement. Finally, Anne tore her eyes from the trees, shaking her head in disbelief. She didn't look up again after that, because every time she did, it seemed surprise her even more. She always seemed to forget just how big these things were. "How, you don't think these flowers are going to be super tall, too, right?"
Fei Fei frowned; she hadn't even considered that. "I... don't know."
"They better be," Anne grumbled, and for the first time, she saw the fog. "Oh, hey, what's that?"
"It seems like a sort of fog," Fei Fei mused, although that was pretty obvious just by looking. "I think it's dangerous."
"Huh?" Anne looked skeptical. "Are you sure? It just looks like fog."
"It already tried to get me," Fei Fei told her flatly.
"...Oh," Anne replied, crossing her arms. She seemed like she still didn't completely understand, which Fei Fei supposed, was fair. "'Get you'?"
Fei Fei opened her mouth to respond, and then hesitated when she realized what she was about to say. "Uh... yeah. It... reached out... for my hand."
"To pull you in?" Anne questioned, and Fei Fei shrugged. Fei Fei watched as Anne picked up a rock, and then tossed it into the fog. The fog... behaved as fog normally would as if a rock was tossed into it. Fei Fei went red.
"It did," she insisted, and Anne almost looked surprised at that.
"I didn't doubt you," Anne assured her, but to Fei Fei's confusion, she walked right up to the fog and stuck a hand in.
"What-?"
"We need to go in there anyway, right?" Anne explained, sounding very calm while Fei Fei was freaking out right next to her. "Relax, it's fine. We'll figure out how to get out when we need to-WAOH!"
Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, Anne was yanked to the side, the fog opening up and then swallowing her like a big hug. Almost immediately, Anne had disappeared.
"Anne?!" Fei Fei cried, and without thinking, she stepped forward, too. It was a split-second choice she made, but it was already too late, and Fei Fei was pulled into the fog, too.
Fei Fei and Anne landed next to each other, face down on the dirt, forcing the air from their lungs. But when the two tried to suck in a breath, no air was pulled into their lungs, only fog, and they choked on it.
Fei Fei gripped her neck, tried to force air in, but there was none to spare. She was gasping in vain, and soon, her throat felt like it was burning, and her lungs seemed to be caving in. As the pain grew, Fei Fei desperately withered. She couldn't think, she couldn't move, even the pink was starting to disappear, replaced by black.
Beside her, Anne was panicking, too. She could hear her friend by her side, thumping on the dirt as she tried to find air. In the part of her brain that could still think, Anne felt guilty, and that thought, along with the strong emotion that came with it, lead to another: they had to get out of here. Through the pain and the panic and the desperation, Anne kept that thought close, and she forced herself back up. She only barely noticed that beside her, Fei Fei had stopped moving.
However, as soon as Anne stood up, she realized she had been knocked down again. All too soon, Anne found her hands and knees in the dirt again.
Anne only could feel the barest hint of confusion slip through the haze of the black spots appearing in her vision. Anne blinked, and then fell onto her face. The last thing she saw before everything went dark was someone's boot, stepping into her field of vision.
'What...?' Anne tried to ask, but she's not even sure the words made it out of her mouth before she completely lost consciousness.
And then woke up again, a few seconds later. Anne and Fei Fei got up at the same time, and took a deep, panicked breath of air, as if they had been starving for it, which they sort of had been.
Fei Fei and Anne sat in silence for a long time, hyperventilating and sitting on the forest floor. The trees loomed around them, and the fog swirled almost menacingly, which did not help the two in the slightest.
Eventually, they got their breathing under control. Maybe it was minutes later, maybe it was hours, but the two finally managed to stand up on shaky legs.
Fei Fei reached up with a shaking hand, and touched her face, and then jerked her hand away in shock. What she touched was NOT skin, and for a moment, the panic was rising again, until she realized, no, she was fine underneath, there was just a mask on her face. A flower tied around her face, she realized when she looked at Anne, who had the same thing.
"Did you do this?" Fei Fei asked her. Anne touched a hand to her mask, as if realizing for the first time that it was there.
"No..." Suddenly, Anne's eyes widened as she remembered. "Wait! It wasn't me; it was the other person here!"
Anne's face whipped around wildly, but the person, if they even had been there in the first place, was gone. Had she just imagined them? No... Anne touched her flower mask again. It seemed to be filtering out the air she was breathing, and it was also proof that someone else had been here. Someone else had saved their life.
Anne let her hand fall to her side.
"Whoever was here, whoever helped us, they're gone now," Anne told Fei Fei. "I only saw a glimpse of the other person before I passed out, so I don't know anything about them, or where they went."
"Okay," Fei Fei replied easily. She didn't sound too judging towards Anne, but perhaps that was more because Fei Fei didn't really believe this person was here at all. She looked around the clearing slowly, pondering their next move, before a realization hit her. "No, wait."
Anne looked over at her, surprised. "Huh?"
Fei Fei touched the flower mask again. "We were supposed to get flowers, right?"
Anne blinked, and then grinned underneath the mask. "Oh, yeah! We did it!... Is this all we needed to get? You know, now that I think about it, the instructions were kind of vague, huh?"
Fei Fei frowned. It took a couple seconds for her to translate Anne's words in her head, but once she did, she saw Anne was right. Her relief at not having to stay in this place was dashed in an instant.
"How would we know?" Fei Fei asked, crossing her arms. Anne sighed.
"Yeah... I guess we can't leave until we sure," Anne agreed. "If we fail this..."
Before her, Gale was fidgeting, but Kipo hardly noticed, which wasn't rare. She barely noticed the screen either, though, which WAS pretty rare. Her mind was occupied.
Allegedly, even with this stupid point of view, Kipo should be able to see everything. She watched as Anne and Fei Fei stood before the forest, staring up at it. She watched as Fei Fei nearly got pulled in, then Anne ACTUALLY got pulled in, and then Fei Fei did, too. Kipo watched desperately as her friends choked on the ground, dying, and though she pleaded with Gale to send help, he refused. However, Kipo didn't see when Fei Fei and Anne got up, flowers tied around their faces. The screen showed them passed out, then it went blank for a split second, before showing Anne and Fei Fei again.
Kipo blinked. She was glad her friends were alive again, but what the heck was that?
She hadn't realized she said it out loud until Gale answered her.
"Huh? Oh," he said, as if he hadn't been paying attention. "Right. We skipped forward in time a little bit, so we didn't have to watch your friends passed out for a long time."
"But you skipped something!"
Gale looked tired. "It wasn't anything important."
"You don't know that!" Kipo argued. "Can't we go back?"
"How do you think time works?" Gale asked her, annoyed. "You can only go forwards, not backwards."
"And also stop time, and also jump around in time," Kipo said, somewhat more sarcastically than she wanted to. "Do you even know what you skipped? What gave them that flower?"
"If I give you THAT answer, will you pay attention to the more important stuff?" Gale huffed. "It was forest spirits. They don't like to be seen, but they like to help people. Happy?"
"No," Kipo answered, and she ignored Gale's groan. "Why would trees want to help people? Don't they want us dead so they can compost us?"
"That's ridiculous!" Gale said, but he didn't sound as confident as before. "That's... it's complicated. We don't have time-."
"We have all the time in the world, you STOPPED time!" Kipo pointed out.
Gale ignored her. "What's MORE important is the actual flower tied around their face. They have the wrong flower! If they leave with that, all other missions will be moot, because you'll have failed!"
Finally, that seemed to catch Kipo's attention. She froze. "Huh...? Failed?"
Gale was watching the screen closely, even though it hadn't moved since Anne and Fei Fei started talking. Kipo thought he looked worried.
"Yes," Gale told her. "You can't use any old flower. It has to be a very specific one, the red one, or else it won't work."
"Right..." Kipo said. "Those grave flowers Coraline and Luz collected."
"That's just what the merpeople called them," Gale grumbled. "They exist all over the world, even in the coldest places, the hottest places and underwater, and as a result of that, everyone calls them something different."
Kipo hadn't realized it until now, but Anne was right. Those 'instructions' she gave everyone literally WERE useless. "We should have given them a description or something like that... now what do we do?"
Gale's eyes snapped up to her. "A description... yes, you may be right about that. We'll have to send them better instructions."
"We can do that?" Kipo asked. She leaned over the table. "How?"
"I have some paper in my desk, and special envelops that can bring your letters to anyone you want them to," Gale explained. "They're in the same place the box was. And before you say something stupid like 'but I didn't see that there last time', I'm well aware. I'll put the necessary things there when needed."
"That was my question..." Kipo admitted sheepishly. "But I'm not actually satisfied with that answer. What do you mean 'you'll put them there'?"
"Just go get it."
Kipo sighed, but she did as Gale asked. She was well aware that he wouldn't tell her anything he didn't want her to know.
But that's fine, Kipo thought as she reached into her pocket, her fingers closing around the pocket knife. She'd just have to figure those things out for herself.
All the locked drawers and secret panels of the desk... yes, they had to be hiding something.