Chapter 2: Following Grandmother’s Advice
The agents traipsed off back to camp to prepare for the unknown journey. Quickly and quietly, each packed a backpack with essentials such as a change of clothes, water bottle, snack, personal items, and each agent’s preferred weapon. Ranging from the medieval to the space age, the assortment of weapons included a crossbow, a handgun, and a tasar, an energy weapon of sorts.
“Hey, Omega,” Forty-Two called, “do you think I’ll need this?” She held up a large heavy wall tapestry. Omega frowned at her.
“What for?”
“Well, it looks pretty good on a wall, and…” She trailed off, obviously having no further reasoning. As they continued packing, Omega turned down requests to bring along a giant moose head, a life-sized cutout of Legolas, and the entire collectors’ set of Buffy episodes on DVD. It took longer than she’d hoped, but finally the group set out, heading back to the shimmery green portal. Thursday led the pack, though not very far. After taking them only about fifteen feet into the woods, she stopped quite suddenly.
“Hey, did anyone see that?” the computer whiz exclaimed, pointing into the bushes. The agents all turned to look where she was pointing, but nothing unusual popped out at them.
“What did you see?” Omega asked.
“A white rabbit,” Thursday said slowly, as though not able to believe that she had seen it. “He was wearing a little jacket, and eyeglasses, and had a pocket watch.” Kaiki snickered.
“Right,” Kaiki said skeptically. “And was he ranting about being late?” Before Thursday could answer, a white rabbit hopped out of the bushes, dressed in a scarlet jacket, little gold rimmed eyeglasses, and a small gold pocket watch could be seen glinting from his pocket. As the agents watched, speechless, the rabbit hopped through their circle and into the bushes on the other side of the trail. It was a few more seconds before any of them moved.
“Follow the white rabbit!” Forty-Two whispered frantically. “My grandmother always told me, if you see a white rabbit, follow it. You never know where he might take you!” With that, the girls crept off into the bushes, Forty-Two in the lead as they took her grandmother’s advice and followed the white rabbit.
It almost seemed as though the rabbit wanted them to follow, as it hopped slowly enough that they had no trouble keeping it in sight. Finally it paused in front of a hole, long enough to make sure the agents saw where it was going, and proceeded inside. Forty-Two looked at Omega, who shrugged in return.
“Let’s follow him.” No one else moved for a second, so Omega dropped to her knees with a sigh and followed the famed white rabbit down the hole. One by one the other girls followed the bunny and the leader down the hole.
The hole itself was just the right size for crawling down – if you happened to be the size of a ten-year-old. Forty-Two fit just fine, but the rest of the agents had to squeeze through the earthen passage. Omega grumbled to herself, as she could just feel the dirt sticking to her.
“Does anybody
else feel like
Now, under those types of circumstances, the usual response for everyone behind the leader would be to back up, lest they fall in themselves. At the very least, you could expect them to stop their forward movements. But these girls never do anything in the usual or expected way. As such, they followed Omega right off the edge of the tunnel, adding their screams as they fell down the hole. Before long the entire group was floating down together.
“We must have reached terminal velocity,” Kaiki surmised, looking around her. The walls of the vertical tunnel were decorated, as though they were in someone’s vertical home. Paintings, bookshelves, and wall hangings passed by them as they fell downward for a very long time.
“Do you think we’re going to reach the bottom any time soon?” Ruka asked impatiently. As if to answer her question, the girls finally landed in a pile of soft ashes. It took a few minutes for them to untangle themselves, but soon they realized they were standing in what appeared to be a fireplace. Omega looked up and was surprised to see a chimney above them. There was no sign of the vertical tunnel they’d fallen down.