Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

In some ways, returning to that old park, with it’s long unoiled swings and roundabouts with dents in them, wasn’t unlike stepping into the hospital you were born in about 20 years after you were born in it. In Anne’s eyes, it wasn’t far different at all; to all intents and purposes, the she who stood there now, arms snaked around that of her two oldest friends, was born here. Hence began a journey that she’d sworn, nay pledged, never to forget and, to that day, still hadn’t.

“How did I know you’d bring us back here?” Sasha asked with teasing resignation. As if the she living her best life here and now wasn’t also born there. “You do have a sentimental streak, don’t you Boonchuy?”

Anne giggled, guilty as charged.

“Well, I think it’s perfect” Marcy chimed in wistfully, “we’d none of us be who we are now if we never came here. Like, there are people who may roll their eyes at a sentence like that but those same people didn’t live through what we did.”

Anne set herself down at the old bench, levelled just right to catch the best view of the dipping sunshine. The hue of the sky was somewhere between a burnt orange and a vibrant pink, promising tomorrow a pleasant day out.

Anne kept up the front to disguise her sullenness momentarily, but it finally decided to slip. “Guys,” she said, “I’m sorry. For letting us drift apart like we did.”

Sasha couldn’t help but roll her eyes – typical Anne, the great mood killer. “Come on, Anne. Don’t get all mopey on us; we’re grown-ups, meeting new people was always gonna happen. Plus, it wasn’t completely up to you to keep us together. It was like you said all that time ago, the hardest thing is saying goodbye.”

Marcy brushed her hair against the side of Anne’s face to be quirky and fun to lift her spirits, and was successful. “And besides, who said we drifted apart? Well, we did drift apart but, things drift apart in the ocean too. And things that drift apart in the ocean can eventually find their way back to each other. Well, sometimes. I guess it rather depends on what's been set adrift and whether they're connected to each other physically or they get caught in the same current of water or don't get swept away by a wave...”

Anne thumbed away a tear from her eye and laughed again, breaking off Marcy's rambling, “I guess you’re right.” She patted her lap, rather expectantly Marcy felt, as if she was hoping she’d feel the Calamity Box between her hands before they met. “Hey, Sasha? Marcy?”

“Yeah?” they asked in unison.

“How long do you think- that is, how much time do you think I should wait before I can allow myself to start wishing that I could find a way back?”

“Back to Amphibia?” Sasha asked.

“Yeah.”

“I find it hard to believe you’ve not been wishing for that since the day we left it behind.”

“I know and, deep down, I wish that I had been wishing it. When we came back through that portal, I told myself that it was a fresh start and it was. You only have to look at where I am now to see that. But I just can’t shake the feeling that wishing I could go back and see them all again undercuts what I needed to learn – to let things go and say goodbye.”

Marcy cleared her throat, “Anne? A simple yes or no and answer it purely on impulse: do you want to go back to Amphibia?”

Anne faltered, looking for a hot second as if she was going to try and justify her answer, but as instructed she laid bare a simple ‘yes’. Sasha patted her back thoughtfully, “You know, Anne, it’s not wrong to have wishes. It isn’t wrong to have wished or even still wish that you could’ve had a happily ever after where you didn’t have to lose your friends and extended family.”

Anne looked up into Sasha’s matured face and laughed, “When did you get to become so wise, Waybright?”

Sasha couldn’t help but smirk at that. Ten years had been enough to quell wayward into wisdom, but she still felt like a day hadn’t really passed. Anne carried on speaking, “I guess this was part of the reason I came here with you two. This is where we were ten years ago when I opened that box so…”

…

“I guess I’d hoped that if I came back here with you two a decade later, I might have found some clue or sign that maybe- maybe the universe was prepared to show me a way back, so I could see the Plantars again.”

“It was a naïve hope, maybe, but I think we all know the kind of lengths we go to for people we love. Now, I’m here and there’s nothing. Nothing but this beautiful sunset and the promise of a tomorrow without them.”

Sasha pulled Anne to one side with both arms and let her head sink onto her shoulder, “And us, Anne. There’s us, too.” Somehow without her notice, Marcy had squashed herself against Anne’s right side in a similar bear hug, nuzzling her head against Anne like a cat again. Anne cradled her friends’ hands in hers and looked up out over the horizon again. “You’re right. We’ll always have each other.”

…

It took Anne’s eyes a second to adjust but it appeared in that moment that the skyline was gradually becoming a rather fetching lilac of some description, something like early morning not late evening. “Huh?”, was all she could think to sputter.

“What’s up with the sky? It’s not supposed to rain, is it?” Marcy asked. Anne thought it looked pretty but equally peculiar to see a dawn sky at dusk. “That’s one rapid change in hue,” Marcy observed, “it’s kind of greyish now.”

“Greyish?” Anne enquired, “I’m no expert but it looks more like a kind of purple to me. Like when you mix a pink and blue paint.”

“Anne, Marcy, I don’t think the problem is the sky.”

The girls turned to look at their third, directly into a pair of rich, red eyes. “I think it’s our eyes.”

A minute cyclone started forming around the bench, embedded in the wind being flashes, shafts of iridescent light, stemming a very familiar three main keys of the colour spectrum.

Blue.

Green.

Red.

The women were stunned into silence as the intensity rose so swiftly, leaving Anne only time to cry out, “Is this…?!”

The light and cyclone were gone, almost as promptly as it had come. Not to mention the now vacant bench.

Is this my sign?

Anne’s head was a church belltower, a blistering throb clattering the inside of cranium like another round of the stentorian symphony of Big Ben. Had Oum been kind enough to drop her an aspirin? Not if the grass underneath her was anything to go by – not to first time she’d woken misplaced in a field.

It suddenly came back to her that she’d not been out for a night on the town and her eyes sprung open faster than a cricket’s leap, to immediate regret for she was lying squarely under the direct beams of an elephantine sun.

“Okay, who’s got the shades? Wait, it’s day?! How long have we been out here? We...”

She rose to her feet and swung her head around, “Sasha? Marcy? Where are you?” There was a moment of cowing silence before a pair of indignant groans a few meters down the grassy knoll on which she was standing made clear their presence.

Sasha had her arm flopped over her face, shrouding it in a limp shadow tapering by the scar on her cheek. Marcy was starfishing, face down, by her feet, raising her thumbs in a gesture of ‘I’m alive’. Sasha meekly pushed herself into a sitting position, grumbling like after one too many late nights filing kids’ cases at work. “Did anyone get the number of that bus?”

“Sash, Marcy, are you okay?” Anne was fumbling gracelessly down the hill in their direction and was pulling them to their feet while they adjusted to the sudden onset brightness and the abduction of the Los Angeles smell. The air was clean, chilled, a refreshment for the lungs as water from a water cooler is to the throat.

Sasha was the first to ask the obvious question, “What the heck just happened?” She was still groggy, accounting for her open lack of bewildered outrage. Marcy balanced herself against Sasha’s shoulder, “Better question, where are we?”

The horizon only felt like it was a mile off, not least because of the rolling greenery and mud tracks littering the landscape hither and dither. There didn’t seem to be much of a civilisation across their line of sight. In fact, it looked very close to utopic, even down to the unfiltered cleanliness of the breeze and the temperature that was pleasantly neither too hot nor too cold. In fact, there was an almost Goldilocks-level serenity everywhere they looked.

It was pretty; very biscuit tin, very oil painting, even down to the waves the sunlight made against the grass blown askew by the wind on the flatland. The aberration of three human women did virtually nothing to upset the obvious peace and balance this place had found itself living upon. Anne was transfixed by what lay before her, “Guys, this… this can’t be what it looks like, can it?”

There was nothing to indicate where there were from where they were standing so Marcy suggested they scout from a higher vantage point over the other side of the hill. The knoll was evidently situated at an incredibly high altitude for when the trio stepped out over the startlingly mountainous peak, they could cast a glance over the breadth of an entire continent. Rich shades of green swathed just about every acre of land, far into the distance where the land met the sea, almost but not quite following the curve of the world.

A large channel from the peaks around the circumferences run erratically through forested areas and encampments with no readily visible inhabitants but there was just enough free line of sight to make out the vague shapes of little shacks and huts and cabins, nestled on ground, in trees or even docked in the water itself.

There were tiny shapes at the open end of the channel welcoming the flow of the ocean, trails of little specks running to and fro between the two corners of the landmass in a motion that set Marcy in mind of the Dover-Calais crossing, a trading route between Great Britain and France.

“Well, you wanted a sign, Anne,” said Marcy, still glued looking out over the marvels of nature set out beneath her.

The wind had been knocked out of Anne by the total unbelievability of what she was seeing. Ten years past and, “We’re back in Amphibia.”

Sasha walked over and stood at Anne’s side, watching vales of tears start to seep down and convene under her chin, plummeting to the soil. “Anne? Sorry to snap you out of it but, um, Marcy’s wandered off.”

Unsurprisingly, Marcy had been drawn over to an old stone obelisk with various amphibian iconography etched into it’s tapered base, splitting into a large, three-sided spire about nine feet tall. “Fascinating,” she was muttering to herself, while scrawling in one of the plethora of notebooks she had squirreled in her bag.

“Marcy? What are you doing?”

“Oh, there you both are. Check this thing out! Is it just me, or does it look like some archaic telephone pole or transmission tower of some kind?”

Sasha tapped her to get her attention, “Um, is now really the time to start gushing over old architecture? I mean, I hate to point this out but, well, we could be stuck here again.” Anne noticed that Sasha wasn’t as frustrated or frightened as she’d expected her to be. In fact, she herself was crying. There was something in how she was speaking and those tears running down her face that supposed that she was just as happy to be back.

“It’ll be okay, Sash.”

Sasha took in a long-drawn breath and calmed down, listening to Anne instead, “Don’t forget, we made it home once. I’m positive we can make it home again – just as soon as we figure out what brought us back here in the first place.”

“I think I may be able to help with that, Ms Boonchuy.”

Off to the sides of the obelisk, a wall had been erected around the site of the monument. A Stonehenge for a froggy world, one might think to see it. Up on one of the supports, a man was stretched out over the curve of the circular wall – not a frog, an actual man. A human.

“Good afternoon. It’s quite pleasant out, isn’t it?” He spoke with a southern English accent, devoid of lazy dialect and word slurring and his tones were something close to baritone. He was dressed like he was in some pseudo-science-fiction show in black and white, a completely achromatic attire with a sensibly clipped beard but unkempt hair straddling the sides of his temples, a look which curiously suited him.

“You’re a human?” Anne called out.

“I’m flattered, ma’am. Though, strictly speaking, there are better times and places to go into detail about what exactly I am. I find the particulars about why you’re here to be much more interesting.”

It was Sasha’s turn to intercede, “Was this you? Did you bring us here? Who are you?”

The gentleman smiled warmly, evidently trying to show the group due respect. “To answer one of those questions, Ms Waybright, I’m merely an invested party and I like to ensure a positive outcome to things where and when I can. In my line of work, encountering despair and disappointment is an occupational hazard so I make it my business to conclude all stories I can with the peak possible conclusion. And as for your second question, I’m happy to inform you that you’re return to this delightful realm was one of your own handiwork, not mine.”

“Our own handiwork?” Marcy asked, her expression a discordance of wonder and perplexion.

“Yes, Ms Wu. Your own handiwork, as I say. You three were, after all, the vessels for the theatrically-named 'calamity powers', were you not?”

“How could you know that?” Anne questioned, defensively.

“Fear not, Anne. As I say, I’m merely an invested agency – and I’ve been following your story as it were with a keen interest." Still Anne plainly wasn't having it, as she pointed out that the music box was destroyed - they had no means of returning. "Who told you that? Wasn't me."

...

"Now you don’t mean to tell me that you believed that energy capable of blowing a moon to kingdom come and tearing open wormholes between entirely disparate dimensions could be diminished as easily as that, surely?”

The girls looked at each other with a swelling trepidation – they plainly had believed that. Anne stepped forward to the Onlooker, “So, it’s possible we could’ve come back here whenever we liked?”

“Are you perchance asking because you wish to know whether the guilt you’ve felt for wishing you could return was warranted?”

She was.

“My dear, you may accomplish your goals and reach a definitive endpoint where you finally find closure, but lessons aren’t unlearned by hoping or wishing or even attaining things that were once thought lost. It’s like when you lose your favourite wristwatch – you search high and low but cannot find it and you must presume that it’s lost forever. But just because you purchase a new one, the old one can still come back. You’ve accepted and moved on but that which held value to you in your past will still prove to have value to you in the future.”

“So,” Anne began asking, dreading the answer, “could we have come back here? If we’d wanted to.”

“Perhaps” the Onlooker replied, “Perhaps not. It may very well have been the circumstances in which you found yourselves today that returned you to this place, the powers within you needing all those years to grow and reconnect. These powers were, after all, something which none of the local inhabitants of this land ever really understood, and only succeeded in… misusing for millennia.”

The Onlooker stroked the stone he was sat on, wistfully considering what might have been. He broke out of his own ruminations and pointed over at Marcy, “You, Ms Wu, should understand the first principle of energy. It’s a matter of simple physics.”

“Energy cannot be created nor destroyed, only transformed.”

“Precisely, my dear. That which once held a power of this magnitude could accomplish many things but being able to defy the fundamental laws of nature is one that it cannot.”

A warm energy radiated within Anne’s chest, a small branch and a set of leaves sprouting from her mottled brown hair. They were like old friends, really. They always seemed to come back, almost like they were part of her – Anne had noticed this during those months she was marooned here as a girl. Sasha felt a small tickle run up her neck, feeling somewhat like how it looks to hold a match over a sheet of paper to watch it browning in the heat.

“So are you saying we’re some kind of containers for these energies?”

“I believe ‘allies’ would be a more fitting noun, Ms Waybright; to consider you containers would suggest that you’re nothing more than tools, which you most certainly aren’t. And with these allies, you evidently have more power than you were originally aware of. Oh, do take the scowl off your face, I’m fully aware the next thing due to come from your mouth is ‘Whoa’, as the vernacular goes.”

Sasha deflated and fulfilled his prediction, staring awestruck at her superpowered hands. “Does this mean we can get home the same way?”

“Need you even ask?” This appeared to be the only question in which the Onlooker found himself rather exasperated, but not because a singularly predictable inquiry had been put forth.

“You know, I do envy the three of you. I honestly do – I have a special fondness for certain people, the best people. The ones who confront hardships and their own demons and weather hell and high water to make the best of their lives. But much like my own home, I only have a certain degree of power over what I can change. Somethings I simply can’t stop or alter; I can try for all the world’s worth but I know it my heart that it just isn’t real, isn’t right. I can’t even tell people my name or it might make a long list of people very upset with me. And I really don’t like being shouted at.”

The girls were all hanging on his words, each harbouring their own degrees of sympathy.

“I guess I’ve got my own demons to brave elsewhere. The truth is, for all you don’t know me, I know you and I want you, and a great many other people, to be happy, where and when I can.”

The Onlooker leapt from his perch and dropped down beside the nearest exit to a slope heading downward, overlooking a deep woodland clearing. “I suspect you’ll remember those woods in due course, Ms. Boonchuy. If you traverse it, you’re liable to find exactly what you want. And Ms. Waybright, Ms. Wu, there are people waiting for you too, even if they don’t know it.”

He stepped around behind them, facing the obelisk still, each turned to face him. Anne spoke gently, “Hey, what about you?”

“Whatever role I played in your being here now or when you choose to go home is entirely up to you. I’m merely an audience with a bit more influence than most. With or without my interference, I hope you all find your optimum happiness on the other side of those woods. You probably won’t be seeing me again, but I’ll be seeing you.”

The Onlooker swept himself around the threshold of the stone archway with a swish of his black coat and when the girls moved to see where he’d fled, he was gone.

“Strange guy,” Sasha thought aloud, "but kinda sad at the same time. Reminds me of someone I used to know."

Or used to be.

“Anne”, Marcy called over, “he said you remembered those woods?”

“I do,” Anne replied, “On the other side of that patch of woodland is Wartwood.” Anne took Sasha and Marcy’s hands in hers, forming a mostly complete circle, “Guys, I’m willing to believe what he said, that we can get home. If we still have those powers, anything is possible and I’m prepared to try if you are. But before we do, I think a visit to some very old friends is long overdue – what do you say?”

Sasha and Marcy said nothing. They teared up.

And then they nodded.

Chapter Text

Room temperature had always permitted for a smidgen of swampiness – that tended to be how frogs liked it. Wartwood residents never needed that grave a dip in local climate to freeze over so when it was cold out, such as it felt at night these days without a moon, every frog and his dog would swaddle up tighter than they used it in their beds, preserving whatever body heat they could muster.

Sprig’s bed was nothing unlike sweltering by human standards but was as frigid as a slab of ice up his back. He wasn’t aware of it whilst he slept, being grateful at least that his capacity to sleep hadn’t been grievously unsettled, but what he did feel upon waking was like trying to stand and realising your legs were on back to front.

Another fidgety night, eh?

Peeling a thin layer of gelatinous grime off his eyelids and allowing them to filter the sunlight through his window as he became adjusted to it’s sudden onset brilliance. Outside the window, the giant fireflies were being corralled back into their daytime shelter; they spent the nights now dozing atop light posts erected around the town to replace the now absent moonlight.

The shockwave they tended to cause when landing had become a new wake-up call for everyone; a loud thud, a minor earthquake and the day had commenced.

Sprig’s face lit up when he’d cleared his vision of sediment and he looked out onto a lovely, fresh morning. ‘Seems like a pleasant day for a misadventure or two’ he thought to himself, his big, goofy smile now set in place and he hopped from his hammock and sprung from his room, taking to the bottom of the stairs in a single bound.

Hop Pop was already at the kitchen counter, brewing a fresh pot of swampside soup with radish trimmings and chopped mushroom caps. “You’re up early, boy.”

“It’s kind of hard to stay in bed after a certain time these days. That breakfast?”

“Yep. Thought I’d experiment with new soup ingredients.”

Polly was waddling up to Sprig’s side – her hair had mostly grown out now, quite rapidly for a few days’ growth.

“I thought you didn’t like to mess around with new recipes.”

“That may have been true once, but by frog have things changed.”

“You’re telling me!” Sprig declared, borderline triumphantly, “Oh, hang on! Let me just grab…”

Polly and Hop Pop winced at the sound of the trap door to the basement lifting – this hadn’t been the first time this had happened, but it still filled them with dread whenever he’d forget that she wasn’t going to be down there anymore.

Up until now, they’d both stayed strong because they knew this was harder on him than on them. Hop Pop left his cooking and sighed as he looked over at the raised hatch. Polly tugged at his jacket.

“How long do you think this is gonna go on for?”

“I don’t know, Polly. We all miss her but… I suspect that it still hasn’t sunk in for him yet. You know how inseparable they were, it was always gonna take him more time to adjust to her being gone than us.”

“Do you think we should check on him?”

Catapulting through the open hatch into the basement, Spring landed very fashionably beside Anne’s makeshift bed, “Hey, Anne. Food’s nearly…”

Anne wasn’t there. Nor were any of her belongings – they’d all come back to Wartwood on the day they departed to gather all their things. The basement had been cleared out then, but nobody had seen fit to dismantle to bed, so it had just continued to sit there, unoccupied, as if awaiting Anne’s return.

Sprig’s knees felt weak and quivery. He was scanning the room in desperate hope for any indication that the last few days hadn’t been as he remembered, that she was somehow still around and would come galumphing down the steps with one foot and padding down them with the other.

But no.

The room was as spartan as the day she first put down here, save for the hand-weaved sacks of produce now sat in the corner awaiting conveyance to the market stall.

Sprig hopped onto the bed – unlike Anne’s bed back in the human world, it was set on the floor, nothing to break under it by suddenly dropping his comparatively weak weight on it. He threw himself onto his side on the bed and balled up, removing his hat and clutching it against his tan-pink chest.

He felt his welling tension run through his face and limbs as he wept into the mottled fabric separating him from the cobblestone floor, stretching and twisting his hat like a damp flannel until his fingers cracked and the ensuing soreness meant he had to stop. He simply rolled onto his other side so no potentially prying eyes would get a clear view of his sobbing, however much they already knew he was doing so. “Why can’t I accept it?” he asked himself, “There was still so much for us to do together, Anne.”

Hop Pop and Polly were both watching with respectable sympathy, glancing at one another with an equally shared concern. “Hop Pop?”

“I know, I’m on it.”

He trundled down the steps and let his old bones settle against the wooden supports of the bed, resting a soothing hand on Sprig’s back whilst he decompressed. “Sprig? Take your time, boy.”

Sprig cuffed his watery eyes, some of which became fixed to his wrist, but he didn’t particularly care. He remained in a little squat ball as Hop Pop bundled him into an embrace. “We don’t want you to stop hoping. We’re just worried about you.”

“Why can’t I just accept that she’s gone?” Sprig sniffed, “I can’t keep waking up every morning and coming down here, expecting her to still be here.”

“Sprig,” Hop Pop took him by the shoulders and looked him in the face, “I doubt you’ll like hearing this, but I doubt you’ll ever be able to accept that she’s gone. I’m sure it was just as hard on Anne having to let you go when she went back home, just like I’m sure that, wherever she is, she’ll be wishing she could accept that you aren’t there to greet her in the mornings.”

It was plastered on Sprig’s face; he was losing him. “But”, he carried on in an attempt to reengage his attention, “that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Just because she’s not here now doesn’t mean that she never will be again.”

“But… “

“I know, I know. But that’s what hope is, Sprig. Believing in the best against the odds. You can’t accept that Anne isn’t here because, in all the ways that matter, she still is. None of us would be here if it wasn’t for her and she left a legacy on this town that no frog is gonna forget for a long time.”

“You’re right there,” Sprig managed to say.

“Maybe instead of mulling over the time you’ve missed with her, think of it as time spent between last saying goodbye and next saying hello.”

“Maybe.”

‘Maybe’ was good enough; Hop Pop shot a thumbs up to Polly, Sprig failing to notice as her stared at his feet.

“Now, I’ve got to go finish breakfast. If you need a bit more time in here, I’ll leave it on the step there.”

“Alright. Thanks, Hop Pop.”

“Any time, boy. Any time.”

Hop Pop walked up the stairs and pushed the hatch closed, leaving Sprig alone. He gazed around the scant room – the Sanctuary of Anne as it used to be. He ran his finger across his bottom lip, lost in thought. There was a stack of old sheets of parchment littering the far desk beneath the window set into the wall beside the outside doors.

“You know, Anne, perhaps a misadventure or two is what the doctor ordered after all.”

Chapter Text

A strong but fresh, velvety and springy lily pad had been set out in the circle outlined by an array of log-composed walls, wedged between equidistant posts at their ends. The triangular split that came naturally to all lily pads had been expertly filled in with a soft mud layer, just sodden enough to mesh with the feeling of the remaining pad.

Polly was poised on her toes, stance wide and low as was vital of all combat training. Donning a loose sparring outfit, devoid of any impairing joins which may have restricted movement, she studied her mentor with agile, cautious augury.

“Now, Polly,” Ivy began, “you remember the Sundance way?”

“You preach it to me every time,” Polly muttered, appearing to be grumbling before adding in a boisterous voice, “I’m more than ready!”

“Then show me.”

The frogs stood mirroring each other, casing one another’s range of windows to advance whilst sidestepping with mercurial foot movements. Over the previous weeks, Ivy had taught Polly the basic starting tenets to her martial art style; the patience to watch one’s opponent scrutinise their footwork and refrain from immediate or precipitant response, the imagination to apply more to their strikes and make the steps more than what they were taught and adapt to attacks that may not truly be attacks.

Polly had boiled it down to three, simple manoeuvres: map, tap & trap.

Both mentor and mentee turned away from each other and hydrated on the sweet, sweet air around them before…

Snap!

Polly sprung up on one leg, sprung up again on the other and pulled her legs into her chest, giving added momentum to her Polly Pirouette by pushing against a far tree with her tongue. In an expertly eloquent twirl in the air, Polly came down to land a blow against her unassuming foe for her feet only to make contact with something dense and unmoving.

A substitute!

“Ah-hem!” came the call from beneath Polly, as Ivy cleared her throat with a mischievous twinkle in her eye and muttered, “Ambush…”

In a swift, breathtakingly agile move, Ivy positioned herself on her left shoulder, swung her legs up into the air, angling her waist slightly and pushed hard up into the air, catching Polly by the tailbone with the soles of her wrapped feet and propelling her straight back to her initial point of launch – only this time on her face.

“Ah. I have to say, Polly, you’ve come a long way in you’re sense of patience from when you started but you still haven’t quite got to grips with properly casing your surroundings.”

Polly just groaned irritably, “How was I supposed to know we were using dummies? I’ve got loads of dummies of myself back home for all kinds of things. And not all of them are technically legal!”

Ivy held out her hand to help Polly to her feet and she took it. “Polly, trying to prepare for a fight like a package holiday isn’t casing. I mean, look at this little guy, I made him on the fly.” Polly just looked at her, bug-eyed as she explained that she’d been quietly drawing together parts of their environment and used the opportunity of her making her pre-emptive move as a window to build it and stage her counter.

Polly kicked a pebble and continued to grumble, “I’m never gonna get this.” She sulkily plonked herself down on a nearby stump and pouted when Ivy frogged over and put an arm around her shoulders, “I seem to remember you saying something like that about reading Bessie’s driving manual.”

“Yeah, except reading that was just boring. What we’re doing here feels like I’m trying to accomplish the impossible. I mean, you pretty much conjured that substitute out of thin air, for frog’s sake! It’s no wonder I need separate classes from the rest of your students.”

Ivy already knew where this was coming from; ten years since ground zero and the world almost kept pace with her aging. Polly never felt like she’d grown into the new Amphibia – the new Amphibia just got older faster than she did, so she still felt like the little tadpole she used to be. Ivy couldn’t really know what being an aimless sixteen-year-old was like; she and Sprig always had things to do after they started exploring new continents when they were kids right up until the present day.

“Polly, my other students aren’t like you. They didn’t have to help ward off the moon crashing into us when they’d barely outgrown their tails. And I train you personally because of how much you mean to Sprig and because of the hope he has for your future. And if it’s important to him, it’s important to me. Why do you think I decided to set-up shop here in Wartwood after all?”

“You mean, Sprig asked you to teach me?”

“Well, he asked me not to tell you this before he got back from his latest trip, but I think you need a little confidence booster. He said that once you’re all trained up, he’d be willing to take you along on one of his expeditions to the other continents.”

“He did?!”

Ivy smiled – that perked her up. “Of course, he did. The reason I don’t teach you the same as my other classes is because I’m not training them to be formidable voyagers into the unknown. I’m training you to be that. And, between you and me, you’re definitely on your way there and your brother’s very proud of you.”

Polly palmed a tear from her eye and clutched it tight in her hand, “Thanks, Ivy. And, if you don’t mind me saying, I think Sprig’s very lucky to have you.”

Ivy laughed, “Heck yeah, he is. I’m awesome!” Polly herself could help but get caught up in the ensuing laughing fit.

“Hey, why is your style so much of fighting and dancing at the same time?”

“Oh, you don’t want to hear about that. Sprig would never let me hear the end of it if I blabbed about that whole ordeal.”

…

“Oh, now I’ve gots to know. Spill the beans, sister!”

Anne, Sasha and Marcy were, no other words for it, lost.

It had taken them what Marcy approximated to be roughly thirty-five minutes to get from their point of arrival to the cusp of the woodland’s rim (all the while wondering exactly how they could’ve seen to the end of the horizon from a hill that in retrospect wasn’t nearly as tall as they thought it was) and went stumbling around inside looking for a path.

There were paths but they were a jumble of overgrown overgrowths and bottlenecked side tracks ending in walls or sunken outcrops or, most concernedly, nests for large, leathery Isoptera with feathery webbing connecting their legs, but they just slept on top of their nest of eggs – the size of the eggs was the main area of concern.

At one point, Sasha had contemplated testing her old athleticism and heaving herself up a stray vine to get a better look over the breadth of the canopy, but only wound up pulling out the floor of a strange birdbox and lathering herself in huge seeds, which the original carrion didn’t take kindly to.

Roughly ninety more minutes of aimless plodding started to wear on even cheery, animated Marcy’s nerves. She wasn’t even juggling her cute, little keyring charms to lift the mood anymore – now she was flicking them against her bag after she’d clipped them back on.

Anne drew aside another spiral of creepers to the astonishingly unfamiliar sight of yet more woodland, she turned back to see Sasha sat down and looking her over disapprovingly, with Marcy flopped face down in her lap. “I know, I know,” Anne said, raising her hands apologetically, “I thought I could navigate us through all this but, be fair, it’s been ten years.”

Marcy mumbled something muffled into Sasha’s lap, like she had absolutely no idea their neither of her friends could follow a word of it.

“Anne, I want to find our friends too,” Sasha admitted, “but there’s gotta be a better way of getting out of this jungle than just following your outdated sense of direction.”

Anne blushed, very bashfully. Sasha looked like she’d just twigged how Anne had really been guiding them. “You haven’t been leading us this way because you remember the route, have you?” Once upon a time, Anne would absolutely have denied such an allegation. But what does an adult have to gain from hiding her feelings?

“No. I’m just hoping I’ll be lead there by instinct. I mean, hey, I was asking for a sign saying whether it was time to return here – I guess I thought I might get another one to point me the right way.”

“Apparently not.”

“Well, we can’t be too far off now. We’ve stuck in the same direction for a while.”

“Whatever you say, Boonchuy,” Sasha grumped, “Just as long as I don’t have to do anymore sightseeing from thirty feet in the air.”

A little, sparkly insect momentarily wafted around Sasha’s head and kept buzzing melodiously as it flew alongside Marcy’s ear. She was up like a shot to get a closer look at the singing bug as it took fright into the foliage. “Guys! Did you see that beautiful bug? I gotta get a closer look – BRB!”

Marcy pranced up from the dense shrub and frolicked off down a floral footpath in pursuit of her truant insect. “Marcy, wait!” Sasha called out from behind her, “Don’t run off, you’ll get lost!”

The silence brooded for a second, palpable, like she may return.

“She’s not coming back, is she?” Anne asked.

“Nope.”

…

“Wanna flip a coin on who goes to fetch her back?”

Anne went heads, Sasha went tails. Up it went with a flick; spin, spin, spin, spin, spin, spin, spin, spin, spin and…

Tails landed, so Sasha trundled off down the footpath to collect their missing Marcy. It reminded Sasha of all the times she’d suggested to Anne when they were kids that they kept Marcy on a child’s harness; that girl had an unquestionable intellect and healthy curiosity but would go off chasing a balloon if it was a slightly unusual colour.

About twenty minutes passed but neither Sasha not Marcy had deigned to reappear from the path. Anne had been trying to calmly count off the minutes of their absence in her head with a soothing meditation and concentrating her mind on kneading all the worries of the world in front of her like a loaf of bread.

“Gah, stop worrying. Sasha and Marcy can look after themselves. Heck, they did when we were kids and they’re much bigger and cooler now.” She was decreeing this vote of support more for her own benefit than that the total nought of people listening.

It had broken her concentration anyway and she stood up, pacing around the glade with a pretty open view of the darkening sky up above. There was still an impassive, serene blueness to the sky but the stars were getting much clearer, so night was definitely approaching and approaching promptly.

Anne withdrew her phone, sleek and blue with three large camera lenses running vertically down it’s back left-hand corner. Her lock screen picture, a picture of her and the Plantars that her parents had gone and gotten scanned for her a while back, was vastly more distracting now she was back in their land, but the light was proving favourable.

“Oh, no. It’ll be too dark to see soon and I need to find shelter or I’ll be completely exposed. But if I leave here, Sasha and Marcy might come back and then they’ll have to come and search for me.”

Stroking her chin like it really would trigger an epiphany, Anne was drawn to the sight of luminescence blanketing the sky over yonder. It didn’t look like natural lighting; it couldn’t have been, not without a moon. It was more like an inversion of light spreading over a floor from beneath a door or ceiling from above one. Up above her, she watched a lantern of medium-sized, purple fireflies woosh overhead in the direction of the sky-spanning lights.

“Fireflies! That’s it!” she declared, exultantly. Acting quickly to avoid losing track of the fireflies, Anne drew her staff card from her back pocket and looped it around a branch with roughly pointed in the direction the fireflies were advancing in. “Hopefully, that’s enough of a clue for you, guys.”

She turned on her heels and hotfooted it into the dark, the power of crossed fingers protecting her from the predators of the night.

Alongside her decision to stay and teach the youngsters of Wartwood their dues about punching and kicking and how to do it in a way that the local constabulary wouldn’t slap their wrists for, Ivy had also accepted a role as Sprig’s proxy on the valley council.

With Amphibia’s monarchy left in shambles after the war, a selection of frogs, toads and newts put forward names to form and represent a long-distance relationship between the continents’ many inhabitants to keep harmonious collections. Sprig was chosen as the Frog Chancellor after the success of their first adventure beyond their homeland and henceforth kept relations strong alongside Braddock, selected by Dignitary Grime after his retirement from the militia, and Yunan, in corroboration with her wife Olivia.

Ivy didn’t so much fill Sprig’s role but stayed plugged into local affairs in his stead.

And one of the tasks Mayor Toadie had given her was to set up light posts outside of town through routes into the woods, keeping the way lit for travellers and lost souls misplacing themselves in the pitch black of night.

Polly’s lesson had run a bit longer than she’d intended it to, so she was already quite waylaid. She thankfully had the benefit of knowing the ins and outs of these woods as well as if she had a map of it etched over her whole body. Moreover, she was blessed with the gift of her love for the baby fireflies being returned to her in all their pretty, purple splendour.

She was roughly two or three miles out of town, a journey she told herself was faster on foot instead of needing a snail to be able to navigate a forest she knew better blind. The amount she could do this late wasn’t ruled by distance from the town or falling evening much as it was that doing the work without a snail meant that she had to lumber the materials for the light poles by hand, which severely limited how many she could punch in before she needed to punch out. She whistled down a lantern of baby flies windborne above her, fluttering back towards the town, and they homed in to perch.

“Aaaand I’m out. Sorry, babies, I don’t have anymore poles you put up for you. But you can join your brothers and sisters on their posts if you want company until I come and see you again.”

The fireflies signalled their agreement; dash-dot-dash-dash, dot-dash, dash-dot-dash-dash. Whatever that meant. Ivy just shrugged and started hopping back down the verges, now unburdened by hefty wooden pickets.

The ground was still warm from her traipsing over it on her way out but there wasn’t much disturbance beyond that. Ivy was accustomed to keeping her guard up whenever she was deep in woodland territory so behindhand and…

She stopped in her tracks – there was a disturbance, a strange large impression in the dirt on the rim of the beaten track and the tall grass leading to a branch path having been roughly parted.

“I don’t know anything out here that makes tracks like this.” Ivy’s face creased and she sprung up the incline, emerging into a deserted glade. Nothing seemed that out of the ordinary, save for the caterpillar ensnared in a tighter, green vine. To allay it’s distress, Ivy drew a small cutting tool from her belt and brought it to bear against the strange trap, which felt like an unusual fabric rather than root.

Before she could cut it, it simply broke itself apart with a click and fell limp to the ground, turning free the caterpillar which humped up the nearest tree into the branches and curled up to sleep for the night.

“Hmm, weird,” pondered Ivy. She grabbed the thing and retreated back to the lit path back to town. Under the light of the fireflies she could get a good like at the object and the oblong slip hanging off the end of it. It was smooth and clean but the gleam from the lights obscured what it said for the minor scratches on it’s face.

Ivy clambered up the side of the post to look at it directly beside a light source and read aloud, “Aquarium of the Atlantic Staff Card – Frogs of the World Exhibit: Name…”

Ivy gasped. And choked on the gasp.

“Oh. My. Frog!”

The fireflies had turned tail and vanished beneath the treeline as Anne had attempted to keep pace with them and she’d completely lost track of herself. The treetops were too thick to decently gauge the direction of the light source now so she had resorted to using the light of her phone to lead her way.

“Hello? Can anyone hear me?” she called to the sky, “Marcy? Sasha? Anybody?!” It had gotten so late that even the beasts of the forests had tucked in to await dawn.

“I can’t be wandering around these woods all night. I need to find shelter.” Just like everything said with a conviction one didn’t feel, it sounded like a good plan said aloud but that certitude was rather offset by the fact that she had no idea where she was going.

She sat on the ground for a moment and muttered a quiet mantra for her parents to comfort herself, “And you, Sprig. What I would do for your help right now.”

Suddenly, and not far off, an object thudded against a firm surface with a comedically cartoonish thunk. It could’ve been some stray animal knocking some fruit from a tree branch and the sound was it clattering against a wooden root or stump or something, but an indignant ‘Ow!’ set her mind on a different string of ideas.

“If someone’s out there, maybe they can help me!” Anne decided before lunging up and charging headlong in the direction of the commotion.

“Okay, let’s try this again,” Polly told herself. Hop Pop had been very adamant about her not spending every night working on her combat skills and, as was typical of a sixteen-year-old girl, she’d feigned having a strop, waited until he wasn’t looking and snuck out to do it anyway. She was tired of not getting the hang of Ivy’s techniques, particularly her silent agility and she wanted to impress her teacher.

She stayed within the boundaries of town, just enough to have a dimly lit sparring area and started slowly treading the boards, getting a feel for her environment and listening for everything, watching and observing and checking for anything in the surrounding area that might prove useful.

Controlling her breathing, she enacted the same move she’d pulled that afternoon, accounting for the possibility of Ivy’s substitute in her head and propelled herself in a slight spin, hoping to keep her body vertical and ably ready to countermand any underside attacks. What she’d failed to consider though, was that without something to stop her in motion or curb her spin, she’d wind up plummeting onto her head.

And so she did.

And then sped into a roll down the hill, landing face first in a mud pond. The mud garbled with noise which sounded a bit like “Well, that wasn’t right.”

Polly lifted her face from the swamp and flung aside the mud covering her face, feeling for any more grazes or bumps. She couldn’t feel any, which was a good sign, up until Polly, in her frustration, saw fit to clobber a tree to vent her self-inflicted irritation and something with a tough shell came dislodged and neatly bounced off her head with a hardly thunk.

“Ow!” Typical. She felt for a lump and only detected the absence of her bow, “Oh, great. Where’s it gone?” Drawing a luminous shroom out of her little pouch and lighting it, Polly scanned over the ground hunting for her little headdress when she heard a rustling coming from a short way off into the bushes. “Ah, a creature of the night. Perfect!” she muttered.

Tapping the shroom again, plunging into shadow again, Polly nimbly hopped up too a higher vantage point and waited for her incoming opponent to become readily available to strike. The rustling slowed it’s pace, the creature it was emerging from winded and stumbling around without a sense of direction to guide it. Perfect opportunity.

Keeping her breathing shallow, Polly checked off the Sundance code on her fingers. Map, case the enemy’s movement and get a sense of it’s offensive capabilities in it’s pattern of steps, check. Tap, lull your opponent’s expectations with false impressions of your own position with audible distraction; Polly quietly hurled a handful of pebbles, one by one, at a rock off to the side, drawing the creature to it.

And lastly…

Trap.

Polly sprang, full force, out of the tree and collided with her shadowy nemesis, bringing it to heel on the ground and disgruntling it. It was big and spindly, like an enormous spider, but it flipped itself over and managed to throw Polly clear to the other side of the outcrop.

Lying on her stomach, Polly listened to the creature clumsily trying to claw at something that had clattered from it’s reach in the initial struggle. She rolled backwards onto her feet and sprung out again, flipping over the beast’s bony form and pressing off it’s furry carapace with her hands. However, on landing, she was dazzled by a brilliant spot of light amplified by the darkness and kicked at it, sending it skittering back towards the predator and she fell back against a stump.

She could hear it rolling over and groaning but her eyes were still adjusting to the sudden beam of light, as plainly were it’s also.

Polly rubbed her eyes until they presented a sense of clarity that allowed her a good look at her quarry before the glow snuffed itself. She gasped involuntarily in her blindness – she must have been mistaken. If she didn’t know better, she’d have sworn that it wasn’t a beast at all. And furthermore, it had been looking at her with it’s own bewildered amazement and disbelief.

Mushroom.

What had she done with that dang mushroom? She found it wedged between her back and a small plot of mud. Reaching for it, shaking and wiping it clean of mud, she thumped it’s head hard and tossed it where the gleam had just been. It glowed brightly and brought everything in the nearby area into crystal clear focus.

Including, but not limited to, the speechless face of a confused and disoriented Anne Boonchuy. Who cared in the slightest for the ten-year difference? There was no mistaking that bizarre arrangement of facial features, and these ones belonged to a world renounced heroine.

“A-Anne?”

Anne was evidently trying to get her own fix on the young frog, not able to place the face but the voice appeared to be the giveaway.

“Hold on- is it..? Polly?”

Anne shifted to her knees and clutched the glowing mushroom and the other light source – her phone. She couldn’t maintain her composure, nor could she hold in a shocked and delighted laugh, “Polly? Is that really you? Look at you; you’ve grown so much.”

Polly’s face was fixed, frozen and faltering at Anne’s smiling face. Nope, words would not suffice for this. Only the next best thing.

“Anne!” Polly bawled, barrelling straight into Anne’s welcoming arms and clutching tight, no longer caring about how old she was and crying with joy into her shoulder.

‘Thanks, universe,’ Anne thought to herself, ‘now if you’ll excuse me…’

Anne joined Polly in holding each other close, clasping one another like the most precious treasure and sobbing lovingly.

“You miss me, baby sis?”

Chapter Text

Anne slipped her hand around the back of Polly’s head and cradled it like a Fabergé egg. Wondrously, her hair didn’t seem all that knotted or mottled for how wild it was. It was the same burning orange as Sprig’s but bunchier and more splayed than she remembered his being. Polly eventually relinquished her bear hug and wiped her eyes dry with the straps of her overalls, a clean strip instead of an oily one thankfully.

“I’m sorry,” she quibbled, “I just… I can’t believe you’re really here!”

Anne thumbed away her own tears in solidarity, “It’s a long story and an even longer time. Look at you! You’re so much bigger!”

Polly sprouted watery eyes again, “Yeah, and you’re so much older!” she teased.

Anne only giggled, and despite herself yanked another hug out of the teen frog, stroking her hair affectionately, suddenly aware from the fact that her’s probably wasn’t unlike a rat’s nest after that little scuffle in the dark and dirt.

“Okay, okay, stopping now,” Anne elected, collecting herself and standing up right. Even in a decade, she’d only grown about half a foot, but she still towered over Polly. Her pale underbelly gave extra distinction to a mouth desperately working to keep itself from running rampant. “To answer the obvious question first, I don’t entirely know how I got back here. I’ve been traipsing around these woods for ages trying to find where Sasha and Marcy went.”

“Sasha and Marcy are here too?”

“Yeah. Some guy we met said that our old connection to the Calamity gems stayed with us. They just needed time to give ‘em a little umph back into life.” The glowing mushroom at their feet started to dim. “Man,” Polly grumbled, “they don’t grow these things like they used to. We won’t be able to see anything once this thing’s gone out.”

Polly snatched up the mushroom and shook it like a glowstick, but it only provided a brief resurgence of glimmer, “We should get out of these woods before we can’t see anything.” Waving the mushroom around as a magician would a magic wand, Polly led the way back up the slope she and Anne had tumbled down, “Luckily, we’re not far from town so we only have to… Anne?”

She was standing stock and looking out through the foliage, Wartwood’s vague outline illustrated by faint torches through the treeline. “How much has it changed?” she asked herself, or Polly – she couldn’t tell who the question was really aimed at. Polly took her hand and stared welcomingly at her old surrogate sister, “Wanna find out?”

Anne smiled, “More than anything.” So, Polly lead Anne, by the hand, out of the treeline and back into Wartwood’s outskirts. The old wall surrounding the town had clearly weathered but the sign with their town motto was still there. It had long broken off it’s old chain and was now just sat on the ground beside the main gate with moss all over it but it was still there. Treading the even-older cobbled paths of the town square, Anne was resisting the urge to remove a shoe and check to see if they were still as chilled under foot as she remembered.

“It’s just like I remember,” she uttered, whimpering.

“Well, not exactly,” Polly called back, coming to a sudden stop as Anne nearly tripped over her. She had paused at the foot of a well-preserved and masterfully sculpted effigy of the town’s teenage heroine, standing pride of place in the position of the old town founder (which had in the years since been moved to somewhere more secluded – the Town Archives).

Anne marvelled at it, feeling a strain in her cheeks reminiscent of a wrung-out sponge courtesy of how many tears she’d shed in the past ten minutes. She read the placard bolted to the bottom of the base, a commemoration to Anne and her impact on the town by it’s grateful townsfolk.

“You know,” Polly began, “I still remember this statue being put together. It was an important job for everyone. Frog, toad, newt, we all pitched in. Look at this.” She hopped up onto the shoulder of the statue, carefully balancing herself as she walked up the length of the polished sword, “This sword was forged in Newtopia, from their finest metal by their best blacksmiths. The toads provided the stone to build most of your likeness and the music box was made by Loggle and his apprentices here in Wartwood.” Polly leapt down to the ground and faced the statue but stared humbly at her feet.

“Everybody pitched in to bring this to life, Anne. We all gave something; time, material, skill…”

“And heart,” Anne finished, “Lots and lots of heart.

Polly laughed, “Yeah, I guess that too.” Anne was quivering, she was overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of what the statue represented. She couldn’t take it – her legs gave way beneath and she stumbled to her knees. Refusing to cry again, she took a number of long, deep breaths while Polly wondered if showing her this had been slight overkill.

Anne sniffed, her head now clear, “I never realised the impact I left here when I went away.” Polly sidled up to her and clutched her arm. “Not just here, Anne, everywhere. You saved our world and all our lives; everyone remembers you and we’ve hoped against hope for so long that we’d see you again.”

She couldn’t help it; no amount of hugging was too much that evening. They had ten years’ worth of the things to catch up on. “I guess our wishes have finally come true.”

Just over the way, the lights in the Plantar’s house were still on, a gleam wafting over Hop Pop’s avocado plantation, which had recently undergone a dramatic expansion involving building a small wooden deck over the swamp out back with spaced bunkers for soil and seeds embedded between them. Anne could also see an array of pipework running up and down the support beams of the deck emerging from the water leading to open funnels suspended over the crops with what appeared to be tiny mesh filters tapered over each end.

While the mechanics of such a set up was impressive, it was something more worth gaping at in the daytime; for now, she only wanted to get a good look at her old, other home. The house had undergone a renovation of sorts. While still maintaining the rustic, agrarian veneer, it had also grown into something more ornate and fitting frogs of status. Anne guessed it must have been after the statue went up that the Plantars started receiving their long-deserving respect and admiration and were thus awarded with amendments to their homestead.

“The house has changed a lot,” Anne addressed as their approached the front door. Polly unlocked the rich, red-painted front door and led Anne inside. The first floor was honestly exactly as she remembered it, barely the slightest detail out of place, aside from the doors leading to the kitchen and the dividing wall forming a closet for Hop Pop’s farming tools and seed reserves.

“Life changed for us all after we took you in, Anne. Hop Pop pursued his dream of growing avocados and he’s become the head of a long-spanning produce trading company. I became an engineer, taking everything I learned in your world and all of what I knew about the technology of this one to make our town better for everybody.” She untied her monkey wrench from the folds of her overalls and twirled it in the air before settling it back against her back pocket.

Anne glanced out the front window again; as they’d approached the house, the extension of the farming platform seemed to grow out ever further, almost like a vegetable-growing factory of sorts but still completely natural and organic – it was even multi-storey. Anne had counted at least three layered decks connected by gangplanks, spread out enough so all the produce growing in the bunkers could receive their much-needed sun.

The question was still forming on her lips though, “And… Sprig?” Anne had been unable to stop thinking of Sprig since she’d stepped foot over Wartwood’s borders, so desperate to see him here that she found herself thoroughly deflated when she’d found no sign of him anywhere on their walk back to the house.

Polly stared up at a new portrait, hanging pride of place over the fireplace (which was still an entrance to the Plantar family tunnels but didn’t typically get used anymore and so the old mechanism which opened it had stopped working years ago) was a beautifully elaborate picture of Anne and the Plantars in their day, with a bit of artistic license given to Anne’s clothing. Fair play to them, she thought, not all that easy to make a knackered school uniform look like a heroic armour so ‘cool anime warrior queen’ armour was a pretty good substitute.

“Truth is, I don’t think there’s anyone in Amphibia who hasn’t heard of Sprig’s exploits over the last few years. You really changed him, you know.”

“Exploits?”

“Yeah; a few months after you left, the toads discovered a new continent and Sprig was one of the party who went over to investigate and explore. Hop Pop and I stayed here at home but we always got letters and drawings from him. And after that, his sense of wonder grew ten-fold. He’s been all over the world, exploring and documenting new creatures and places and having all these crazy adventures. He’s done such a good job at it that they made him the Frog Chancellor of the Valley, the spokesperson for all frogs, connecting us with the toads and newts across the... well, everywhere.”

Polly had an unmistakable gleam of pride in her eye as she caught sight of the little picture of Sprig also nestled on the mantle, but it was also shrouded in a tinge of woe.

“It’s mostly because of him that we live like we do now; just a pity it means we don’t get the see him much these days.”

Anne’s heart pinched, “So, I guess he’s not here then.”

“Nope. He’s busy on one of his diplomatic crusades across the waters; he always treasured his sense of adventure.” Polly lifted the picture from the surface and stared longingly at it, “Hop Pop once said that he felt that Sprig’s calling was to discover new lands in your honour, flying out there as if he’s trying to find you again. Heh, it’s funny really. After all this time, in order to find you, he need only have stayed at home.”

Anne was caressing her wrists and looking aside, hoping the visage for guilty bashfulness would disguise her eyes watering up again. She hurriedly dabbed at the with her sleeve and hoped that Polly hadn’t seen. If she had, she didn’t bring it up – she was already morphing her own expression, looking to perk up and lift the mood of the room.

“But enough reminiscing, I know where you’ll wanna go!”

Polly tapped on the creaky wooden hatch to the basement with her foot and it raised with a automatic whir, a new hinge system having been installed from beneath. She led the way down into Anne’s old makeshift room and lit the mushrooms that had been fixed to the walls and connected by a peculiar luminescent trail of some mossy substance that triggered each in sequence to brighten when the one closest the entrance was whacked.

It was warm and homely and, importantly, familiar; scarcely anything had changed. Beyond the desk beneath the outside window and a few drawings and pictures pinned to the wall by large spines, dulled and rounded at the grip ends to make them grabbable, it was a picture-perfect replica of the room as it was three-thousand, nine-hundred and forty-seven days previously.

“You never changed it?”

“Sprig wouldn’t let us. Something Hop Pop told him a few days after you were gone. He’d be waking up every morning and coming down here to greet you and break down into crying fits when he remembered you weren’t here, but Hop Pop convinced him that you’d someday find a way to come back. And after that he pledged never to change your bedroom in case you needed it when you returned.”

Anne thought long and insurmountably affectionate thoughts about Sprig – that boy was always too sweet for his own good. But she at least had the bedroom here now that she had returned, so she couldn’t argue with him on that point. “Well, he was right there. Remind me to thank him when he comes back.”

“Whenever that’ll be.”

Anne was kicking off her shoes and sitting on her bed, soothing the aches in her bare feet which had been taken to town in all that trampling across uneven marshland.

There had to be a reason for this.

She’d asked the universe for a sign that it was time for her to come back to Amphibia and the universe provided. She’d hoped for a sign that would point her in the right direction toward her other family and friends and, once again, she’d been accommodated by nature and her womanly wiles. So there had to be some plan, some yet-unseen development in the fact that she’d came all this way and the person she wanted to see more than anyone else in this world or any other wasn’t there to greet her.

Her ruminations were cut short by an abrupt and, were it not for the welcomeness of it, brusque thud from the room above and the bellowing “Polly Petunia Plantar, we need to talk!” which came tagging beside with it’s arms entwined.

Polly threw a side-eye glance at Anne, who registered it – she knew what Hop Pop was going to be complaining to her about, but she’d like to see him disapprove at what this particular cat had dragged in from the cold. She gestured something in the air that was supposed to say ‘Wait for my signal, then come up’, but Anne didn’t really get that as Polly tapped up the steps.

Hop Pop was beside the front door, his regular displeased stare on his face. Hop Pop’s displeased face was never anything scary, the man didn’t really have it in him to be frightening in any way that did the word justice but she knew it would be less frightening in this instance because she had the power to make that unimpressed glare vanish at her command.

She tottered into the front room as casually as a Sunday afternoon and all but curtsied at him with a sweet smirk on her lips, which only made Hop Pop’s rankle further rank. Arms crossed, he reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew Polly’s yellow, polka-dot bow.

So, that’s where it had got to.

After slinging it back to her and waiting for her to replace it to her hair, Hop Pop simply stood awaiting an explanation.

“Okay,” she sputtered, “so the thing is-“

Hop Pop interrupted her with an exasperated sigh, “Polly, how many times have I told you not to pull all-nighters practicing your fighting skills? You’ve got a job now, the townsfolk need you to be alert.”

“Okay, that’s fair, but, Hop Pop, if you’ll just hear me out-“

“All I asked tonight was for you not to still be awake when I got back from the council house. Those frog-forsaken Wildstyles intent on sneakin’ aboard every cross-continental journey are giving me and the other councillors the run-around, so I’d much appreciate it if I didn’t have my own granddaughter givin’ me the same problems when I get home.”

“Hop Pop, if I could get a word in edgeways, there’s something I need you to-“

“Polly, it’s been a long day and I’ve wasted most of it trying to convince Mayor Toadie to try and slide things with Grime and Olivia, which I’d honestly hoped would go much easier than it his so whatever it is, it can wait until morning.”

Hop Pop simply yawned and was turning tail to hurl himself straight through the doors of his bedroom-slash-study when-

“Sounds like this was a good time to show up again.”

Hop Pop flinched but rocketed his immediately spurred head right around, like an owl, in stunned disbelief to watch as Anne’s head and shoulders emerged from the still slightly parted hatch to the basement.

“I thought you were waiting for my signal,” Polly mumbled.

“A signal that sounded like it wasn’t going to come for at least twelve hours if I waited any longer,” Anne countered and pulled herself to her full height from the basement and towered over the dumbfounded Hopediah, who was practically munching his tongue as if he could break it open with his teeth and the right words would come sprawling out of his mouth.

“Yeah,” Anne began with yet more tears in her eyes, as if she hadn’t shed enough already, “I couldn’t think of the right words either, but I’ve got it on good authority that this works just as well, if not better.”

In a single sweep, Anne had swept Hop Pop up off the ground and bundled him into a tight hug against her chest, which he promptly returned. Polly couldn’t help but beam after them as Anne crouched down to let Hop Pop back down to ground level, bringing them face-to-face for the first honest time in ten-years. Hop Pop cleared his vision of moisture and looked Anne’s welcome features up and down.

“It’s… it’s good to see you, girl. But how…? why…? when…?”

“All good questions, Hop Pop, and ones that I promise I’ll give you answers to, but for the moment, I just wanna enjoy being back home. That is, if I can still call this place home?”

Hop Pop smiled, “Anne, this place hasn’t felt as much like home since you’ve been gone. I’m privileged to welcome you back, sweetheart.”

“Thank you,” Anne could only wheeze out and enshrouded Hop Pop once again, to be joined from above by the excited delight of Polly, who did not want to be left out of this group hug.

The morning had come and despite the late night, Anne, Polly and Hop Pop had woken early enough to witness the break of dawn as the fireflies roused from sleep themselves and had this little hover to stretch their wings which had the added benefit of providing this beautiful, iridescent sparkle as the low-hanging sunbeams struck from above, mixing with their own natural luminescence from below and bouncing back into their abdomens with a truly magical colour show inside them.

They’d sat for an hour or two as the rising sun shone out over Wartwood, with a fresh, frigidity that even the frogs could appreciate surrounding them, talking at length about everything that had happened to them in the ten-year disunion. It was nice, it was heartening, it was…

Incomplete.

“I just wish Sprig was here to join us.”

Hop Pop patted Anne’s hands, “We all do. Polly and me, we always miss him when he goes off on his journeys but we’ve still always been able to see him come back.”

“Plus, you two are his family,” Anne pointed out, not a little dejectedly, “He only knew me for a matter of months. It’s not like that’s enough to make him rush all the way home, not after ten years.”

“Now, don’t you start talking crazy, Anne Boonchuy.”

“Huh?”

“A matter of months as you put it is more than enough to make someone care about somebody. Not to mention, you saved his life and our entire world in those few months. You really think he’s gonna forget you after all that? And besides, if that were the case, then surely you’d have been less determined to get back here to find him, right?”

Anne couldn’t argue; the man made a good point.

“Yeah,” Polly interjected, “Hop Pop’s right. Never mind your legacy to this town, Anne, your legacy to us is something that we’ll never forget. Sure, you’re like a renouned hero who saved the whole, entire planet but your also our family. Is it any wonder that I was so excited to see my big sister again? Or that Hop Pop was so relieved to see his other granddaughter?”

Hop Pop and Polly both made their concluding point in unison, “You’re a Plantar, Anne. And we Plantars have a long memory and even longer hearts.”

Anne accepted that they were right, but she still had worries about the townsfolk, how they’d be about the fact that she’d suddenly dropped back into their lives.

“Well, maybe we ought to check it out?” Hop Pop suggested, “It’s like Polly said, you are a famous hero after all.”

“I was a famous hero, guys. Now I’m all grown-up and I’m just a simple Herpetologist, I’m nothing special now.”

“Just like you weren’t anything special when you turned up in our town when you were 13. Or have you forgotten that those same townsfolk used to think of you as a monster before you won ‘em over,” Polly pointed out.

Anne sighed and got to her feet, “You’re right, Polly. And it seems like they’re all coming out to start their day anyway, so…

“So,” Hop Pop interrupted, “now’s as good a time as any to get you reacquainted with the people of our fine town! And then we can get down to helping you find Sasha and Marcy.”

Yeah, it was.

A public stage had been constructed on the rear side of the mayoral office building – Toadie had prided himself on presenting himself to his people as simply another denizen of Wartwood, not a higher level of citizen. It was a good place to sequester Anne until Hop Pop and Polly awaited a window to cut in on Toadie’s morning announcements and bring her forward to let her see everybody again.

There were about five minutes worth of declarations, proclamations, matters of business, a small celebratory speech to a recently wed couple in the crowd before all the early morning business had been settled.

“Now, is there anything anybody wants to say before I return to my duties?” Toadie asked to the floor.

The ensuing bid for attention by every adjourned frog could almost have been mistaken for a developing brawl so Hop Pop and Polly had to skirt the outside of the furore and clamber onto the stage themselves to grab the microphone from Toadie and settle everybody into silence.

Hop Pop cleared his throat, “Now, then, since Mayor Toadie has kindly given me the chance to speak, we do have an announcement to make. Something, or someone, rocked into town last night and, well, we think you’d all like to see who it is. Polly, if you could…”

A loud bell suddenly sounded from the top of the spire situated on the roof of the mayoral office – it was usually rang in times of emergency to bring the citizens closer together but the townsfolk had stopped bothering about the emergency bit whenever it sounded since there always seemed to be some new kind of disaster brewing so everybody just came when it rang out anyway.

At the top of the belltower, quickly hopping her way to the bottom of the belltower and then further down to the stage was Ivy, clutching tightly a green lanyard with a glossy, plastic card suspended from a clip at the end of it.

“Everybody, you’ll never guess what I uncovered last night. I was out late fixing down some new light poles when I found myself in a clearing with this tied around the branch of one of the trees!”

Yeah, I probably should have expected that. Anne was listening intently at the sudden surprise; how had she failed to be detected by Ivy of all people?

“People of Wartwood, it’s my belief that our town hero is back in Amphibia! You hear? I’ve discovered clear proof that Anne has come back to our world and it somewhere out there, probably lost and cold.” The townsfolk were all standing in awe of the news; it took Anne a matter of moments to see that it wasn’t just the Plantars that had been anxious to see her again. The whole town really hadn’t ever forgotten her.

Polly patted Ivy on the shoulder to get her attention, “Well, that certainly makes things a lot easier. Alright, Anne,” Polly shouted back, “you can come out now.”

On cue, Anne stepped out from behind the ruby red curtain to the gawps and stunned silence of the frogs gathered below her and she spoke aloud to everyone in earshot, “Hi, everybody,” her words were febrile and jittery, but not slurred, “I can’t tell you how good it is to be back here. Now, I know it’s been so long since I’ve seen you all but…”

“Alright, you frogs!” One-Eyed Wally cried out over the silence of the assembled masses, cutting Anne off mid-flow, “You know the drill!”

The crowd suddenly became an ecstatic parade as a merry crowd flocked the edge of the stage, swept Anne off her feet and, highly celebrity-like, carried her over them in a wave, cheering her name and jumping with a new day’s jubilation. Hop Pop and Polly watched over the crowd, Anne’s face a portrait of jubilation.

However, underneath, there was still an unerring sense of things being incomplete and it put all of her euphoria beneath a leaky umbrella.

She was being welcomed back to her home from home with all but her best friend.

With all but Sprig.

Perhaps, somebody in the town thought, somebody ought to see to that…

Chapter Text

Since setting up the light posts for the fireflies, some ignoble fauna had taken it into their heads that Anne’s memorial was just as functional a roost as any other. A couple of insects every few nights or so nestling on the air or head or mock up of the music box and Sprig had chased them off each time.

‘This is not yours!’ he’d always think to himself.

Sprig treasured the statue more than just about anything else and had religiously tended to it night after night for four years straight. His first expedition to uncharted ground had been an admittedly clumsy success but it had ignited the yearning to do more, to see more, learn more. But at the same time, he felt confined to his old hometown.

He’d chartered every square inch of the valley and surrounding regions of the continent; all that was left for him to do now was take a leap of faith and sail into the great unknown. And what’s more, the opportunity to do so had arisen just recently.

Quite a commitment, the position of Frog Ambassador of the Valley; too great a responsibility for him maybe.

Sprig snuck out of his bedroom window at the dead of night, as he always did. He suspected he’d get the usual spiel about the proffered position from his family before his feet hit the ground if he exited through the door. But he had a rendezvous to keep.

He came to rest at the foot of the monument, holding tight a knapsack slung over his shoulder. Undoing the knot, he unwrapped a beeswax scrubber, lamprey oil and a clay-moulded inkwell full of a magic lacquer the newts had concocted that Maddie traded in for eight coppers a fluid ounce. He went over the box with the beeswax, polished the sword and hilt with the lamprey oil, cautious not to leave a footprint behind on the reflective metal and doused the remaining areas of statue in the magic goop.

The tiny facets of Anne’s face took the use of a very fine brush, slow strokes around the august craftsmanship of the eyes, lathered again and again until it came out first-rate & smooth and as reflective as a virgin water face.

“Evening, Anne.”

His voice was exuberant. It was bereft. It was wistful, it was determined, it was glum, it was mournful. Tonight, it was curious. Nights fell and fell again, and Sprig was simply stressed and anxious and he didn’t like it. He’d come to talking about his day with Anne whenever…

Well, in truth, it would have been simply to calculate how often he failed to come talk to her. He had his fiddle under his arm as he stowed his poundage into the crock of her parting, running his finger along the stem of the crafted leaves.

“Remember that thing I told you yesterday? About their offer? It turns out that they weren’t kidding. They actually want me, me, to be the Frog Chancellor. And, honestly, I can’t begin to get my head straight about this. It’s a huge responsibility and Hop Pop thinks it a great honour that I should be asked at all. And I guess he’s kind of right, but that’s not what’s stopping me. All these adventures I’ve been on since day zero, that felt right. It felt like something you’d want me to do – more than that, I felt like me, really me. I’m not some all-important bureaucrat, I’m an explorer, an adventurer, a dreamer. Aren’t I? I’m still that, right?”

He sighed.

“And that’s what really frightens me, Anne. The fact that it’s come so quickly to the time in my life where I find myself needing to question who I really am. This town, it’s changed in so many ways and a lot of those ways are for the better. We don’t fear strangers and outsiders anymore, we welcome travellers. As a community, Wartwood is stronger than it’s ever been. As a home, though. Well, it’s just become part of a much bigger world and life for us young frogs, finding a place in it has become incredibly hard.”

Sprig raised himself on his elbows and watched over Hop Pop’s plantation; Polly was squabbling with her new wrench set whilst Hop Pop was cosily gabbing with a few gathered townsfolk around a ring of wooden chairs set up overlooking the backwaters under the dipping sunlight.

“I wish you were a part of my future – I don’t think there’s anything we couldn’t do as a team. You and me, Spranne against the world, eh?”

He felt like laughing with bitter triumph but thought better of it.

Yeah, Spranne against the world. Even though I’m far.

Sprig jolted, like the reflexive kick of one’s body when in too deep a sleep. This, however, didn’t stop him from falling off the statue’s head. Was that what he thought it was?

You’re probably wondering if the statue’s talking to you, right?

“Okay, my hearing Anne speaking to me in my head is definitely a figment of my stressed imagination,” Sprig assured himself, “Or maybe I’m just crazy. One of the two.”

Aw, you’re not crazy, dude. What you’re hearing is me, as much me as you want me to be, if you catch my drift.

Sprig darted his eyes from left to right, “Uh-huh.”

Well, you could sound a little happier to hear me.

“Yeah, but you’re not really here. And no matter how badly I want you to be real, you’re just a voice in my head.”

Not your head, Sprig, your heart. That’s where I’m from. You know deep down how badly I miss you, buddy, and I’m now here to tell you that you should become that chancellor.

“What?!”

Dude, this is a super big deal. These frogs and all the other people in Amphibia, they asked you because they believe you have what it takes to do this. And, hey, this doesn’t mean you can’t stop having adventures. I think this might be the start of your biggest adventure yet.

“But, I don’t know if I’m ready.”

Trust me, Sprig, if my voice in your head is telling you that you’ve got this, then you’ve totally got this.

Sprig looked over the statue; he loved the monument deeply. He fingered the hem of his bomber jacket, trying not to look over at the band of cleaning equipment still bundled in his knap sack.

“I guess this is what growing up really feels like. Deciding when it’s time to let go of home and move on to better things like you did. Maybe this is what Hop Pop meant, about me coming to look for you. Maybe if I do this then, I won’t have to worry about not having you here with me to talk to at the end of a long day. I won’t need to by worried because I’ll be out there trying to find you again.”

Attaboy. See? It’s not all so bad. You won’t be alone in your future, buddy. And no matter if we’re together or apart, speak your messages to me out loud. One way or another, they’ll find me, just as my messages reach you.

This time, Sprig did chuckle, “You know, you’re pretty wise for a voice in my head.”

And your pretty wise to know what this voice in your head would say to you in person.

“Heh, I guess so,” Sprig muttered, taking the knap sack up off the ground and placing a hand against the statue’s leg and then his forehead against the hand. She’ll always be here for when he came home and every frog in Wartwood knew they would know his righteous vengeance if he returned to find so much as a fleck of dirt had fallen on her while he was gone.

He turned from the statue, back towards the house, calling up to the muted blue skies, “Good night, Anne.”

A momentary pause.                                         

“And, I love you.”

…

I love you too, bro.

Chapter Text

One of many community centres around the East Los Angeles district, this one was more like a church than a communal abode. X was forensically, or rather fastidiously, inspecting the references of the attendees like he did every single time. The Boonchuys were all-together of the opinion that X was slightly too in love with his job.

What exactly was he expecting? The family to have been spirited away in the dead of night and substituted by elaborately disguised plants like that mediocre movie Infiltration of the Body-Switchers?

“Are you done, X?” Anne asked impatiently.

“I am a man of fervent integrity, darling. This is not a process that I’m comfortable rushing.” He poignantly emphasised each syllable of comfortable, towing a line between theatrical and patronising. Mr X boiled down, really.

She pinched the card from his hands and pocketed it, “Dude, you’ve got to get over this paranoia. If the world is still spinning at the same speed it was yesterday, then I’ve not gone all evil and used my now-depleted superpowers to destroy it or something.” X flushed, plainly appearing to have had his haughty words fed back to him on a little plastic spoon and still choked on them.

Here comes the aeroplane, he could hear Anne’s voice sarcastically tittering in his head.

“Fine, go on through.”

Oum and Bee smiled at each other as Anne lead the way into the meeting hall. “But I resent the implication that I’m paranoid!” X called in after them, all the while Anne ignored him.

“You know,” Oum whispered to her husband, “I think someone should help him get out more; he takes too much interest in his work.”

The family broke up to move around the array of seats, positioned in a semi-ovular arrangement in the middle of the hall. It wasn’t a large room but it was well-ventilated (a welcome benefit to any gathering place in the midst of an L.A. summer), warmly lit and, frankly, the only functioning meeting hall that was still in one piece after what the media had dubbed Frogmageddon had wrought fire from the sky.

Most of the chairs were occupied, with the two on the left side of the broken oval left vacant for Anne’s parents, Bee sitting in the left chair because it was closest to the refreshment table. The other gathered members, comprising of Dr Jan, Dr Terri (now the proud wielder of an honorific doctorate), Ally, Jess, Molly-Jo, Humphrey Westwood and a select other people who wouldn’t sling allegations that anybody in this room were out-and-out mad as a March hare.

The accounted gathered swapped pleasantries while Anne ran over her face with a cold flannel by the sink nestled in the kitchen off to the side. Drying her face on a towel that had already been there, the placed her flannel on a worktop under a direct beam of falling sunshine to dry and prayed she wouldn’t forget it. The cold sweats she’d been experiencing at night for weeks was the reason she’d started carrying it at all.

She looked back over her shoulder at everybody in their seats, where even Mr X had deigned to join them. She hadn’t invited him from the first meeting of this therapy group – he’d just shown up every week for purposeless security checks. Because only a man that insecure would think that Joe and Jenny Public would start shouting about talking frogs to the rafters and not attract any number of strange looks.

Anne cleared her throat as she re-joined everybody and they were all respectfully quiet. Even if Humphrey was always quiet, he only ever showed up to hear Anne’s stories anyway.

Anne pulled the whiteboard forward and meekly raised her hand in greeting, “Hi,” she added softly.

Everyone murmured their greetings, even X. Anne rubbed her arm, self-consciously. Molly-Jo spoke up, “How has this week been, Anne? Any night terrors?”

Anne scratched the back of her neck, as she always did, like she always had a difficult time offering an answer to the well-intentioned questioned every time it was posed by whoever it was that posed it that week, “Well…”

She was looking dolefully at her parents. “A few nightmares, yes. We thought we’d try staying with her downstairs every few nights to see if it helped,” Bee explained, taking Anne’s hands and caressing it tenderly, a sign of assurance that it was still in one unblemished piece, like the rest of her.

“Thanks, daddy.” Since coming home, since the night terrors started and she’d rocket out of bed, either lurching up or falling onto the floor in bitter cold sweats or pooling tears, she’d regressed and resorted to calling her parents by mommy and daddy again.

Oum and Bee knew why. They’d never told Anne that Oum had gone straight upstairs and fainted after hearing that saving Amphibia had legitimately killed her but they’d just been so relieved that she’d been returned to life and was home safe that they hadn’t thought much of it afterwards, for their shame.

Anne sniffed loudly, “Thank you for checking, MJ. Anyway, we should probably get started. Did everyone bring the pages I emailed?” Most attendees drew copies of a little fragment of manuscript out of their bags, coats, pockets. Ally and Jess, clinging to one another, had theirs emerge from the top of what looked to be a large clockwork owl of all things.

X’s assistant Jenny had even come along with a print of her own and guardedly slipped a microchip into his upturned palm, which he then prudently inserted into the arms of his glasses under the guise of running his hands over his bald head and the text started forming behind the tinted lenses

Anne pulled a seat up behind her and put herself down in it, pulling her own copy out from her yellow hoodie.

The top of the page read, in large italic letters, Anne or Beast?

She wiped a tear away as her attention returned to what she was doing, “So, as I said last week, I was wandering around in caves for days when I first arrived in Amphibia. It was awful but my situation changed really fast on the fourth day.”

“’Caught ya!’ I said to him. ‘Thought you got the best of Ol’ Anne, eh? Well you didn’t!’”

Anne’s story had to be cut off by somebody pointing out how time had dissipated and that her eyes were sagging more than Westwood’s cheeks. The meetings were about 90 minutes a piece in the evenings, which gave everybody as free space in which to attend whilst still accounting for the fact that Molly-Jo still had a curfew to meet and Ally and Jess were the ones driving Mr Westwood around for a bit of volunteering credit.

Mr X had skulked off without much pomp, unusual for his demeanour but fitting that of a government busybody. Dr Jan waved Anne off with a good night, promising a catch up for coffee one evening to talk more about this week’s adventure.

The drive back home in the dark was the tense part and Anne regularly felt cold.

She wished she could forget dying, it was so exhausting and exhaustion was now something to dread. Oum sat in the back with her, holding her daughter’s ear to her chest. A technique she’d taught her after one of her midnight fits of panic. She’d listen to her mother’s heartbeat, tap it out with her fingers and control her ragged breathing.

The breathing was a tool and that tool had a specific purpose. It regulated the heartbeat, slowed it from it’s often elevated tempo and reigned it in, just enough so that the noise she was hearing and the beats she was feeling feel into rhythm.

“Is that better now, sweetie?” she asked and Anne shuffled. “You know for as long as my heart beats, it’s doing so for you, so you can draw strength from it. You singlehandedly saved an entire world from destruction; I think you are owed that much.”

Bee helped Anne into her bed once they’d made it home; he’d come to appreciate the effort Anne had made in keeping it clear, just something representing how much she was trying. She was out like a light and his arms were full carrying her so he simply rested her on the bed and turned to leave the room.

With the door closed, nobody was there to notice the thin, luminescent streaks of blue drifting from Anne’s mouth as she exhaled. It caught on the ceiling like steam and just faded in with the bizarrely textured roof.

It didn’t seem to be one of those nights where the terrors would come prowling – Anne was smiling instead.

She even stifled a weary chuckled and mumbled.

Yeah, Spranne against the world. Even though I’m far.

She continued to mumble for a minute or two, chatting in her sleep, before settling graciously into comfortable rest, silent as a lamb.

Chapter Text

“How did you get back here?” asked the frog in the back, asked the tadpole in the front, asked the young amphibian somewhere between the two standing under someone in the crowd. There were lots of muttered questions, to the same effect of the obvious. A few tadpoles in the arms of their mothers of fathers looked up and asked who it was that was getting everyone so excited; most of them, however, were new-borns or toddlers.

“Eh,” Wally enquired, looking up at Anne’s more refined face, “have you developed a squint? Got to tell you, love, I approve.” He winced the left side of his face to burlesque a wink but looked as if he’d just forgotten how to blink is functioning eye.

Anne giggled at his jovial posturing – her face had developed a more naturally set squint as she’d grown up; people often told her it made her look like her mother. She bent down and straightened the vagabond’s hat. “It’s good to see you too, Wally,” she added with a wink.

The old bum’s cheeky smirk deepened.

She raised to face the rest of the town, “It’s amazing to be back, to see you all again.” Those closer to the front of the rout gawped up at Anne, whose face was buckling under the weight of trying to remain composed.

She’d taken off her green work shirt and fastened it around her waist, the white vest she was wearing beneath sufficiently airing out the squalid sultriness of the midday sun.

Polly and Hop Pop idled up beside her; Hop Pop raised his arms to quell the onslaught of questions from curious frogs left right and centre so Anne could get a word in edgeways, while Polly clasped her staff card and lanyard to her right, swinging it in a circle beside her like a bola in one direction and then the other.

“All right, ease up, all of you! Let her speak.”

The rabble quietened, save for the odd tadpole or two who were distressed and confused and resorted to crying. It cut through the silence of the people, just as Anne literally cut through them to approach the nearest weeping babe in arms.

Her father was nuzzling her tail like a cashier would a banknote in an attempt to calm her, but he looked up at Anne’s approach. The baby had her eyes shut tightly, either to protect them from the sun or out of fear that she was about to be eaten. Her father made efforts to apologise for the baby’s concern, said she was only a few weeks old, she’d barely come out of their house, hadn’t seen the memorial or wouldn’t have understood the story of why I was erected in the first place.

Anne patted his shoulder and wordlessly, inoffensively opened her hands in a request for her to take the baby.

The father humbly, if taciturnly, placed his daughter into Anne’s arms, which curled affectionately around the little tadpole. When the baby opened her eyes, she was bundled into the crock of Anne’s arm while her other hand was stroking her head.

“It’s okay, sweetie,” she was saying delicately, “I’m not gonna hurt you. My name’s Anne; do you have a name?”

The baby didn’t speak. She was too young.

Jody, the father told Anne her name was.

“Well, Jody, I hope you and I can become good friends.” The little girl’s pupil’s sparkled with curiosity but the crying had stopped. Anne planted a small kiss on the patchwork hat the baby was wearing and handed her back to her father, cuffing the traces of moisture from the corner of her lip. All the parents of young, frightened infants had their babies look on at the display and they all looked placated enough to stop crying.

Or they were simply worn out and needed a nap, one or the other.

Anne walked back over to the front of Toadie’s mayoral platform and addressed the Wartwood residents again, “The thing is, I didn’t come here by myself. I hope you can all remember Sasha and Marcy?”

The people murmured amongst themselves and some of them nodded.

“Well, when I first arrived, I lost them while I was finding my way here through the woods. I don’t know where they could be by now. I can’t find them by myself so…” she broke off. “I’m gonna need your help in finding them – I have to make sure that they’re safe.”

Mayor Toadie sprung up from somewhere under Anne’s feet and landed square on the lectern, clearing his throat, “Frodrick, if you would do the honours,” he called back to Toadstool, waiting in the wings with a scroll, dictating the town’s missing persons mandates. “My pleasure,” he doffed his non-existent hat in respect before unfurling the scroll and calling out to the masses, “Alright, you all have an assigned search party whenever a missing person hunt becomes necessary. If you don’t remember who your partnered with, you will be reassigned your search partner by me here at the town hall. Let’s get to it, people!”

All the parents shuffled off out the back of the crowd and back to their homes to not impede the search parties and to put their offspring down for a kip whilst everyone remaining partnered up and scattered into different directions through, around or even over the woods on giant dragonflies.

Nobody knew how to direct those things better than Paul – he got his wedding in the end, albeit thirty feet from where the nuptials were performed (and where his bride’s finger was).

Anne gaped at the efficiency of the townspeople as they marched off in such bewilderingly cordial uniformity. “Don’t you worry yourself, Ms Boonchuy,” Toadie told her with a broad smile as he adjusted his monocle, “your companions will be brought straight back here once the good people of this town have tracked them down. And we won’t give up until they are safely located.” Anne smiled, relieved.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Hey, it’s the least we can do for the woman who saved us all from oblivion all that time ago.” Toadie leapt from the lectern and marched up the steps of the town hall with Toadstool listing off his mayoral tasks behind him.

Hop Pop took Anne’s hand as she watched them disappear, “See, Anne. Saving the entire planet is a huge thing. Something so big, no frog in their right mind is gonna forget it. It don’t matter how long it’s been since, if you’d never been here, we’d all be dead.”

“I guess your right. They really didn’t forget me, did they?”

“No doy!” Polly chirped. “Come on, those plebes have this handled, we’ve got time to kill. Who wants lunch?”

Anne faltered, “I’m not-“

Hop Pop patted her hand, “Anne, you can’t do any more right now. Stop worrying. Polly’s right, you look like you could do with a meal.”

As if on cue, Anne’s stomach burbled, a cry of distress from a digestive system having not been used in about 36 hours.

“You sound like you could do with one, too,” Hop Pop finished.

Anne acquiesced, the pinch in her sides from the sudden onset tummy ache spurning the idea of taking no for an answer and nodded. Polly looked excited, jabbering something about new recipes and pages taken from the Los Angeles book.

“Holy. Froggin’. Sauce.” Anne exclaimed breathlessly, letting the empty yet still greasy bowl of traditional noodles slip out of her hand and land on the floor as she herself sloped into a slump on the chair.

Save for the stains that now smattered over her white tee, she let the stew settle into her gut.

Those noodles, Anne felt, had no right being as magnificent as they were. She wondered if she’d even chance going as far as to say that human noodles don’t stack up to frog ones; which in itself wasn’t a sentiment she’d find herself reasoning.

Hop Pop was merely chuckling in gratification over the evident satisfaction of his rhapsodic customer, who was rubbing her abdomen in a circle motion.

“Hop Pop, I’ve never tasted noodles like it. How did you…?”

Hop Pop cut her off with another chortle, “Oh, I learned a few things about food from your world. Mostly that you may have had something of a point when you told me way back then that “Old things were dumb,” with air quotes he punctuated. “Plus, Sprig may have suggested a few different meals to Stumpy that you had written on your old phone. Kinda kicked off from there.”

Anne’s lips pierced at the mention of his name, as she thumbed the edge of her current phone, the smart, polished blue face still with fingerprints all over it from the soup but with the clear screen being kept unblemished by the fabric of her pocket.

“Great idea of his, don’t you think, Anne?” said Polly, “We even finally one the potluck because of it. Even though Toadie ordered the shame cage taken down because he didn’t feel like slugging balls at muck at a family was ‘very sporting’, you know?”

She wasn’t disappointed in that fact in her tone of voice but she didn’t hasten to taper the sharpness of her words as she air quoted ‘very sporting’.

Polly picked up the basket holding the leftover vegetable waste and took it over to where a small metal grate was sat on top of a vertical stone chute. She lifted the grate and tapped on it enticingly, “Alright, Mulcher, come get you’re snackies!” She tipped the basket’s contents down the chute and they came to a thud at the bottom of the shaft.

Anne snuck a look – a colossal, pale pumpkin was waddling around burrowed out enclaves which used to be a small, underground settlement. It dashed up a cabbage head with spots of pink on it’s surface and gulped it down, looking up the chute at Polly’s smiley face and panting, wiggling on the spot happily.

“I’ll bring you your dinner shortly, I’ve even got some ruined eggplant infested with grubslugs!” Polly called down as she closed the hatch while the elephantine vegetable flopped onto the floor and scooped up it’s meal with it’s… tongue, one might call it.

Anne was slightly lost for words, eyebrow cocked up – “Well, where else are we supposed to keep him? He likes it down there.”

Another childhood adventure memory – Anne took a deep breath and counted off in her head how many of the greatest hits had been incorporated into Wartwood’s way of life after all this time.

It was, candidly, quite humbling.

Ivy was scouring over the greenery with a fine-tooth comb, dissecting it for any indication of two wayward humans having passed through the general vicinity. A footprint would’ve been good right about now – she’d seen Anne’s footprint last night, she’d hardly loose track of something that oddly shaped.

She double-took. Something approaching from behind, slowly, cumbersomely, as if it couldn’t have any less interest in being detected.

“That’s because I don’t have any less interest in being detected,” Maddie intoned, “I’m kinda supposed to be here, remember?”

“Oh, Maddie,” Ivy blushed, “Sorry, guess I got a little ahead of myself.”

Maddie pinched her fingers just slightly apart.

“No sign?”

“Only these strange glistening trails… which would appear to be coming from a split in your bag there. What have you brought with you?”

Maddie pushed her hair from her face and shrugged, looking Ivy in the eye, “Hey, I’m always finding weird new ingredients out here. How do you think I run the most successful potions business? Everyone knows how to make all the common stuff.”

Ivy had never really considered it – she and Maddie were friends, but they never really spoke about their work. Or much else, really. It was the reason that she’d requested she and Maddie be partnered together for community tasks.

After Maddie had rigged the assortment of herbs and spores and, porridges (Ivy honestly couldn’t tell) in her bag and roped the spilt back together, they carried on into the trees. They stuck to the regularly treaded path in silence for a while, the one hitch in Ivy’s otherwise tremendous plan to find common ground between the two of them to strengthen their friendship – the wasn’t a great amount of it.

“So… seeing anyone?” she eventually asked, sheepishly.

Maddie pulled her fringe apart and dramatically scoped the woodland out in front of them before letting it droop back in front of her eye and her deadpan demeanour reasserted itself.

“No.”

“Erm,” Ivy began, “that’s not quite-“

“What you meant; I know. That’s the question I was answering. The answer was ‘No, I’m not’. It’s not that I don’t have time or anything – it’s just that most boys ‘round here don’t really think I’m all that.”

“I’m sure that’s not it.”

Maddie smirked, “I appreciate it, Ivy, but we both know it is. I’m just too creepy for most people, with all my black magic training and potions that turn people into giant, ugly bird things and all that.”

Ivy grappled with her wrist, “You’re just… misunderstood. And, I think your magic is cool, unique. And, honestly, those chumps are missing out.”

Maddie just shrugged again, “Maybe. Why are you asking anyway?”

Ivy swung her head away to avoid Maddie’s gaze. “Oh, just wanted to gossip. See how you were doing.”

Maddie was staring, entirely uncommunicatively.

Not buying it.

“You sure? Or is it more to do with telling Sprig about…”

“About what?! There’s nothing to tell Sprig about, don’t be silly!” Ivy cried at a speed even she knew was too fast.

Ivy’s broad and insufferably false grin immediately sank to her toes, “Now’s not the time. Let’s just keep looking for Marcy and Sasha.”

They kept walking but Maddie didn’t drop the matter, “You know, Anne being back isn’t going to distract him from this.”

Ivy scoffed, “Of course it will. He loved Anne more than anyone, including me. Whenever he comes back, I want him to have this reunion without having other things to keep his attention.”

“What, even incoming parenthood?”

Ivy nearly fell over but caught herself on Maddie’s shroud as she doubled over - she’d been so blasé about saying that. More to the point, how did she even know about that? Mother of Frog, did the word just take on such a bone chilling tone. Parenthood. Only Felicia knew how she felt; she’d thought until a moment ago that she was the only one who knew.

She threw her hand over her mouth and hiccuped.

“Aren’t you happy?” Maddie asked.

“Of course, I’m happy. But afraid too. I mean, mom was about six years older than I am now when I was spawned. I’m not worried about being a mom myself – we’re frogs, it’s not uncommon for us to lay out eggs at this age.”

Ivy hiccuped again.

“There’s just a lot of big things waiting for Sprig when he comes back and I want him to enjoy them all equally. He’s waited for almost 11 years to see Anne again. I want him to have that reunion without letting this overshadow it.”

Maddie crossed her arms and looked sympathetic, “If that’s what you want.”

“It is.”

“Okay,” Maddie let go a deep breath she’d been holding and unfolded her arms, gripping Ivy’s shoulders firmly, “then we should get you back to town PDQ, mom-to-be.”

“Why?” Ivy asked quizzically.

“Well, because you’re hiccuping quite rapidly now on account of how your egg is about to spawn and you need to be in shallow water?”

Ivy nearly shrank, “What?!”

“Relax, I got this.”

Maddie leapt up onto a high tree branch looking out into an open area of canopy. She withdrew a small tied bag from the folds of her tunic and hurled it into the air as it blew apart in lilac power. A mottled grey kill-a-moth crawled down the trunk of the tree and came to rest on the ground and Maddie hopped down on its back, pulling Ivy up behind her.

“Come on, you big, beautiful nightmare! Away!”

The moth scratched it’s ear before taking a hefty beat of it’s wings and propelled inside upwards with it’s legs, now flapping heartily enough to created enough lift to keep it aloft.

Once high enough above the tree line, Maddie, as if she were the empress commanding the coliseum, boomed “To Wartwood, we fly!”

The beats took the instruction and caught in a current gliding in the direction of the town.

“Yoo-hoo! Howdy!” came a voice from one side of the girls or another, “Up here!”

Maddie didn’t take her eyes off the direction they were flying, “We’re a little busy right now, Paul! Can’t it wait?!” She found she was only shouting over the onrush of air flying into her face.”

“I just saw you were headed back to town – I gots these letters for Mayor Toadie, you see-“ A curved sting with two paper scroll tied to it were hung beside his head, “Oh, thank you, Pinfeld.” He snatched up the notices, and the skewered millipede he subsequently ate, from the sting and dropped them onto the moth’s fluffy mane.

Maddie remained clueless and Ivy was too busy hiccuping to care. “Umm, thanks.”

The airborne frog was already being carried in another direction, “You’re welcome!” he shouted back, his words echoing over the landscape.

Curious, Maddie gripped the notices and scanned through them. Her pupil, likely both if one could tell under the mass of her fringe, contracted and rage untidily stuffed both sheets under her arm straps.

“What is it?”

“I’ll put it this way, you might be getting what you want after all.”

Anne was laid out over the wall emerging from the front of the Plantar’s house. She’d taken her boots off and was rolling the soles of her feet over the smooth stone blocks the wall was made from, one hand over her stomach, the hand propped on one of her raised knees.

“And that was when the baby newt sprung out of the kids hands and got stuck in his nose.”

She peered down at the floor where Wally was splayed, listening intently. “Ha! I’ve not got a nose!”

“Oh, really? How do you smell?”

Wally sat up and sniffed his armpits, “Pretty fresh by my standards actually, Anne. Cheers for asking.”

Nope, Anne was thinking, not even gonna.

“Anne!” came Polly’s ecstatic cry of triumph. She was bounding across the vegetable plot like she’d just been made warrior queen. “It’s Sasha and Marcy! They’re okay!” she bellowed, brandishing a parchment.

“Really? Where are they?”

“Exactly where you’d expect. Ivy and Maddie came back from their search, quite a bit earlier than expected I’ll say, but they had this note from Newtopia, which also got added on by the Toads. The others are with our friends elsewhere in the valley.”

Anne swatted aside the sweat forming on her brow and brushed down her hair in relief. She looked at Polly’s face again; it appeared near to bursting.

“We’ll, don’t leave me in suspense, what else do you have to tell me?”

“It’s Sprig!” she bellowed, brandishing a second parchment.

“What about him?” Anne almost whispered.

“He’s on his way home! Isn’t that great? Hop Pop and I were expecting him to be gone for at least another month, but… Anne?”

Anne wasn’t really paying attention; she had her hand open in front of her and tears forming. Polly handed her the notice and she read it through, clutching it hard to her chest when she was done. She desperately wanted to weep with joy but felt a bit silly doing so in front of Polly.

“Tomorrow. He’ll be back tomorrow, will he?”

Polly patted the parchment, “That’s what it says here. Why?”

She looked at the letter, a tear dabbing at the cracked, dry wax seal. “I just wanted to know how much time I have to prepare.”

Polly looked confused, tapping her temple to convey as such, “Prepare for what?”

Anne leapt down from the wall, her left foot bouncing off Wally’s suddenly inflated chest – regaining her composure, she listed her desired materials, including a rope, a pile of leaves and an incredibly cackhanded stake that doesn’t look anywhere near as sharp as it actually is.

Polly considered, particularly the last one, pondering on how exactly Anne expected anybody to deliver on something so outlandishly specific, “And you want to do what with all this stuff, exactly?”

Anne turned to face the way into the woods and, without turning to check, lifted her left boot from the ground and replaced it on her foot (but not her sock to the right one – she didn’t want to so completely ruin another pair).

She waded past Polly to the front gate of the farm, “I’ve been waiting ten years to see him again,” she turned to face Polly with the lowering sunlight outlining her headline a magical glow, “I know exactly how I’m gonna do this.”

Chapter Text

The hole that they placed Domino in was dug between the flower beds equidistant to the second floor supporting Anne’s window. The little wooden cross was formed of two pieces of PVC wood nailed together in opposing orientations – it wasn’t flashy or even elaborate but it did the job. Bee tipped the last spade of dirt over the mostly covered pine box and smoothed it over, gently slotting the cross into the ground behind the ovular impression in the soil with a mallet.

He placed an arm around his wife’s shoulder, which she knew and understood was more for his benefit – he was always an emotional sort. There was no right way to handle a loss like this, but Anne had requested that Domino be buried close to their home.

They both looked up into the outward facing window of Anne’s bedroom. The curtains were wide open and the window open a crack to allow for the squalid air to be refreshed but Anne wasn’t in view. Up in the room, she was sat with Dr. Jan, who’d taken to visiting them recently – they’d gotten fairly close in recent times.

“How are you holding up, dear?” she asked, placing her cup of tea on the wooden seat between her legs and Anne’s on the dresser behind them.

Anne wasn’t crying; she looked distant. Peaceful, but that wasn’t to be mistaken for content. She tapped her lap with her fingertips, trying not to force eye contact with Jan. She instead grabbed her tea and downed it pretty quickly, in spite of the heat – some Amphibia delicacy of some kind neutering her detection of overtly hot consumables, Jan pondered.

“I know it’s sad, Anne. You can trust that I know – I’m a grown woman. I’ve seen my fair share of… well, reasons to mourn in my time.”

Anne sniffed, sharply.

“Oh, nothing’s wrong, Dr. Jan.”

Jan started as Anne leapt from her seat in a single, energised bound and scooped up her rucksack, quickly but delicately, as if she were handling a porcelain figure. She was unceremoniously sidestepping towards her sliding closet door.

“Really? No offence, kiddo, but I find that kinda hard to credit. You’re only 15 after all.”

Anne’s hollow expression glazed over again, something Jan found herself more than impressed to discover was actually possibly. She slid the closet door open with the back of her foot and nestled the bag in amongst her clothes and boxes, akin to putting an infant to rest in a crib.

“I promise you, I’m totally fine, Dr. Jan.”

She started the slide the door shut – the bag was still just about visible in the dwindling light cast by the open shutter. So was the fly that found it’s way out of the unfastened zipper. Which the bag suddenly plucked from the air with it’s bright…

Yellow tongue.

Dr Jan narrowed her eyes as the shadow consumed the bag behind the sliding door before closing them and sighing.

“You’re completely fine, are you Anne?”

“Oh, yeah. Absolutely great, never been better even!”

Jan got to her feet and walked over to the closet door, standing over Anne with a sympathetic face. She slid the closet open again and raised the rucksack from the ground without even turning to look. Much the same calibre of inflexible expression as Anne’s dead-eyed face of mock insouciance.

Jan upzipped the rucksack and reached in with one hand, lifting it delicately back out with a pink South American treefrog piggybacking on the crest of her forefinger. It’s bobbing, yellow eyes just stared absently into Anne’s room looking as pleased as punch or as clueless as, well, Dr Jan, who was wondering where Anne had managed to squirrel this little fella out of.

Anne’s face didn’t even wince, locked in scary perpetuity. Her irises bled out pooling numbness, a rasping pit of hoax dispassion or solace. The frog sat idle on Jan’s finger, gazing into Anne’s eyes with not the slightest idea of what was happening. Anne’s smile persisted.

It was blank.

Haunting.

“Anne,” Jan began after a minute, “turn around. Face the door.”

Anne continued to stare before Jan called her name again, slightly more insistently and Anne complied.

Jan settled the little frog on the mattress behind them and it sat there. It may even have been asleep – it was difficult to tell, she wasn’t a herpetologist. She returned to Anne and rested her hands on her shoulders, “I’m gonna count down from three, Anne. Okay? That’s all I’m going to do, a simple count from three to zero.”

No reaction whatsoever came, so Jan commenced her countdown.

Three

Tw-

Anne barrelled into Jan’s chest and screamed, roared even while the tree frog looked on. She clung onto the doctor, her face buried so deep into her jacket that it couldn’t be seen for her pale ears. Jan closed her arms, one hand taking Anne’s bushy hair and the other cooling her overheated neck with her tepid palm.

She sounded through her sobs like she was trying to say Domino’s name but kept stumbling over the ‘D’ over and over again, like her tongue had knotted.

They stayed like this until Jan’s legs tired so they had to sit on the far end of the bed, backs pressed against the wall beside the window. Outside, Bee and Oum had been silently respecting the grave they’d dug whilst waiting with bated breath for the illusion to shatter.

That seemed to have occurred.

The executives of the Aquarium of the Pacific were well within their rights to be spitting fire about one of their specimens having been, for lack of a better word, abducted. The Boonchuys had gone inside first that evening to sooth the troubled waters, while most of their explanations fell of deaf ears by the manager of the amphibian section.

He had a stocky face, far paler than someone who worked in such a stuffy place ought to be and was close to blowing a blood vessel when Dr Jan stepped inside, woman of miracles that she was to put the man’s mind at ease. She had Anne pressed to her side, her eyes swollen and racked with a guilty stare while she nuzzled the Aquarium’s frog like a precious treasure.

The managers previous anger evaporated as he saw the child before him. “Come on, Phil,” Dr Jan pleaded to him, “does she look as if she needs lecturing. She’s exhausted and made an irrational decision.”

Anne stooped out of Jan’s hold and approached the manager, lifting up the frog in an invite to take him. “I’m sorry,” she whimpered, “It’s just been too much. And then I saw him and…”

She swallowed.

“I found I just couldn’t say goodbye again.” She gave in and wept again, not crocodile tears as one would expect a teenager to employ when they’ve been found guilty of a misdeed and are angling for a means to water down their punishment.

Phil just took a deep breath and turned to one of the display habitats. Taking out his keys and unlocking the hinged glass panel to access the habitation of tree frogs and let the little creature back in to join his fellows.

Anne was looking in at the frog, resting her elbows in her hands. “Hey, kid?” Phil addressed her, with his somewhat exaggerated New-Yorker accent. “Look, I can’t allow you to take any of our specimens because we’re legally required to ensure their well-being – it’s why we’re not a pet store.”

Anne looked away; she knew this had been a stupid idea.

“But, I guess I can look past this one time, ‘cause you’re clearing going through some rough stuff. I ain’t an unreasonable guy, just a guy trying to do a job. But, maybe, we can sort something out. I’ll admit there aren’t many kids your age who are so passionate about this place that they’d try and filch one of our little buddies here.”

Anne wiped her eyes and looked at him, “Say, eh, do you know much about frogs?”

She nodded, not daring to speak until she knew where this was going. “Great stuff. ‘Cos I was thinkin’, this exhibit’s kinda short handed lately and I’ve been asking if we could find some volunteers to come and do a kind of summer job around here.”

Anne returned her attention to the frogs in the glass box. “It wouldn’t pay obviously, but if my ol’ pal Dr Jan here is willing to vouch for ya, I wouldn’t mind offerin’ you a sort of internship position here for a few weeks, give yas a little experience. Plus, I somehow think you’re not really looking to make a quick buck with this whole thing, are ya?”

Anne’s parents came to her side and she looked up into each of their faces, faces which were  unquestionably reading ‘Do it’.

“I guess it means I wouldn’t have to say goodbye. Not in the real way.” She looked back inside the habitation, the manager not endeavouring to press her for a meaning. She looked back at him and nodded, graciously. “Thank you, I… I’d love to volunteer here. That is, if it’s not too much trouble.”

“I can help with her references!” Jan chimed in from behind.

Phil took Anne’s hand and shook it, “I’ll see what I can do, missy.”

“It’s Anne.”

“Sorry. I’ll see what I can do, Anne.”

“By the way, do any of these frogs have names?”

The stocky fellow looked into the box at the amphibians floating around inside, “I don’t think so. Why? Would you like to name one?”

The pink one with the green eyes and yellow tongue, “Ah, the pink South American tree frog. Also the one you ‘picked up’. Sure, what do you fancy calling him?”

Anne’s parents glanced at each other – a pair of comedic side eyes from two people sharing an inside joke with the punchline about to be set down. But it wasn’t so much a joke as something of unparalleled importance to Anne.

“Sprig,” she answered, “I want to call him Sprig. Sprig II.”

“The second?” Phil enquired.

“Yeah,” Anne replied, “And he’ll mean the world to me. Much like Sprig the first meant so, so much more.”

Chapter Text

Some two or three years previously, the Chancellors of the Valley made a new map. The Blue Lily region – a thriving metropolis of sorts, counterpoising swathes of workmen and workwomen out patrolling the waters and settling disputes between the childishly fickle dockmasters that would diligently watch for so much as a fly crossing their water buoys (with fruits on hand that were much tougher than they chose to admit) with simple homeowners in their little encampments.

Once left to their own affairs, the Blue Lily Port gradually became a kingdom of industry in and of itself. It came to be Amphibia’s most prolific outpost for cross-water trading, primarily because it was the fastest. It took much less time for produce and machinery to be transported across the sea between the alternating corners of the valley than it did to traverse to the bottom of the crevasse and back up the other side of it. Though it did make life difficult for foreign sailors and their ships, which tended to need a whole subsection of the port to set up.

The expeditionary vessels were no different. When the newts had constructed the runways for the ships to pass to and fro without colliding and sinking, of which there was an embarrassing number of recorded cases from when they first began operations there, they’d employed the use of private births for the ships which set out for alien soils carrying very important people.

Sprig’s ship, the Spirited, was among those that was to dock inside one of the walled enclosures. A warehouse-sized birthing house had been built on a straight that had been dug into the outline of the valley by a determined construction movement with large dividers erected to keep ships privately tucked away.

The ship was ornate in a quaint, pastoral kind of way – it was made of valley sourced woods to give it a homely feel but the architects being of a more flavoursome fashion sense went to town with the decoration and had to be clipped around the ear when it kept upturning.

There was no elaborate technology strewn anywhere; it wasn’t the frog way. All the mechanics that contributed to the ships practical safeguards were all homespun. A pair of refurbished and repurposed flatpack waterwheels had been stowed below the deck for easy assembly and installation on fold-out bearings covered over with hinged planks on the port and starboard beams.

Sprig was perched, leg hung across the other, on the bow of the ship, watching in his peripherals over the top of his notebook for the sign of Blue Lily ascending from beneath the waters of the horizon’s province. He was dabbing at the corner of the page with a pencil, leaving small graphite dots imprinted over the head of an exotic bird he’d roughly etched onto the parchment.

He had a folded note over the left-hand page that he patted with his thumb.

He stared bewilderingly at it – quite a strange man, he was.

“Sprig!” called Davey Joe from the cabin, his full beard tied to a point at the bottom and hanging over his shoulder, kept pinned to his back by a messenger bag’s rope strap. He caught Sprig’s attention and pointed off into the horizon, “We’re closing in on home, forty-five minutes, roughly!”

Sprig backflipped off the bow to land expertly back on the deck and snapped his notebook shut, slapping it down on the bag of, well, something the newts had stowed on deck, bookworms that they were. He swung back the green jacket tails covering a small leather holster with a ring-shaped bronze clip, holding in place his retracted, golden telescope. Lifting and pulling it from the clip, Sprig flicked it open with a fluid, masterful motion and peered through it.

As Davey Joe had described, the birthing house was just pulling into sight, as was the waterway that led to the turning circle to the Spirited’s own birth. Keeping his eye on the horizon, Sprig shot his tongue out the side of his mouth to a cloister bell mounted on the starboard bow to signal the able crewmen and crewwomen to start pulling out the turning wheels.

“Land inbound!” he called out into the speaking tube, drawing his telescope away from his eye, twirling it in the air and pushing it closed with both hands, catching it as it started its lazy gravitational descent to the deck. The sunbeams bounced off it’s polished, curved surface into Sprig’s eye, save for the engraving, no less visible off it’s bright, white sun-time luminesce.

To Sprig, [love] Anne

“You quite alright, lad?” Davey Joe was on Sprig’s shoulder, scanning his mulling face.

Sprig opened up his notebook again and unfolded the letter against the fully scribbled page, “Why do you think they’ve called me back? Could something have happened back home? And these letters, they don’t actually sound like Ivy. So, if she didn’t write them, who did?”

So many questions, Davey Joe just went bug-eyed. “No idea. I’mma get some lunch. And I’d advise you do the same – Wartwood’s quite a way off. Also, there’s no-one at the wheel so I ought to get something before it’s time for me to start turning this thing around.” He then turned on his heels and quick-marched down to the cabin quarters for a Sea-Salt Stew, which to the best of Sprig’s knowledge didn’t actually have any sea salt in it. And was probably all the better for it, honestly.

The waters below the curved underbelly of the boat spoke to him, not like the swamps and rivers of the valley. With their serenity and their usually undisturbed surfaces which only ever spoke in whispers that never revealed any secrets. The words the ocean spoke took Sprig out of his own head, enshrouded him in nature’s rabble, the wavy, blue crowded room.

His eyes snapped open and he tore loose a blank page from the back of his notebook and put pencil to it.

Scribble. Scribble. Scribble.

Curling his hands into a hollow ball, he blew into his thumbs, his undulating fingers creating an oscillating whistle as he forced the air through. An enormous mosquito dropped onto the deck beside him. It wore a strange kind of saddle with pockets all around it, into which Sprig slid his note. “Take this to Newtopia, tell Lady Olivia that I’m heading through there first. I should run this by someone I trust first.”                                                                                                                                  

Joe Sparrow stood vigilant outside the Ministerial Palace, somewhere only frogs or newts with a rather ostentatious number of letters after their name were permitted to set foot. Sprig paced back and forth in Olivia’s office whilst she picked apart the letter with a fine-toothed comb.

“I must be honest with you, Sprig, I fail to see where the problem with this lies.”

“Well, there’s gotta be something, surely. I know my girlfriend; she doesn’t talk like this in her letters.”

“If you were so convinced of the unsupported authenticity of this notice, then why, prey tell, did you come running straight back to the valley on it’s say-so?” Olivia asked, her immaculately curled hair scarcely flexing a strand. She watched for Sprig’s response, hands clasped together atop her pearl-encrusted desk.

Sprig confessed; he wasn’t entirely sure. It had been some kind of innate calling, not a yearning but something more deeply embedded. It had been like a subconscious summons back home, his very essence having been touched by a warm, familiar energy or impulse.

“You mean you were homesick?”

“Not homesick, exactly. It felt more, strong, than that.” Sprig circled his chest, “Here. It wasn’t something I knew, it was something I felt.”

He looked up at Olivia can caught the tail end of a sharp glance to the doorway behind him; he turned to look but there was nothing and nobody there. She cleared her throat, “Well, I must say that you probably ought to act on that instinct if it’s proven strong enough to drag you hundreds of miles across open seas.”

“Well, that’s a quick turnaround. What happened to you being incredibly sceptical about it just a second ago?”

“Maybe I simply have work to do, Master Sprig. Don’t forget, I’m also one of the Valley Council, I can’t spend all day being your therapist.”

“So, this is you trying to get rid of me so you can get on with stuff?”

“You were supposed to be out there for another three weeks if you recall. But I suppose I can’t blame a boy for wishing to see his family.”

And, perhaps, something else…

“Don’t let me detain you, you’ve a long journey ahead of you. I will allow you to be flown as far as the woodlands to leading to your town on Joe Sparrow, but I require him back here swiftly.”

Sprig didn’t seem to react as Olivia took to her feet, rounded the desk and spun him on his heels to push him slowly to the open door, “My aides will see you safely off, have a nice trip.” She pushed the door closed before Sprig could utter his confusion.

Padded footsteps moved away from the door until they were mute, at which point Olivia flung herself in the direction of the window and scrawled over a sheet of parchment in humorously untidy calligraphy. With equally cackhanded attention to the wax seal, she whisper-shouted out of the window to one of her postal crab-wasps, which happened to be clutching a frog in one of its grips.

“Afternoon, ma’am,” utter Paul in a marmalade tone, doffing his hat.

“No time for that. Take this to Mayor Toadie in Wartwood and ensure it gets there yesterday.”

Olivia’s squint was enough to put pay to Paul’s questioning how that request was supposed to work and he instead tied it to the crab-wasp’s stinger as it took off towards Wartwood.

A few minutes later, Olivia finished watching her aides delay Sprig’s departure long enough for the crab-wasp to get a head start before they sent him off on Joe Sparrow and let out a sigh. Smiling after the majestic bird as the morning started to bloom, she was patted on the shoulder from behind.

“You know, I kinda wish we could see what happens when they see each other again.” Marcy commented longingly, “I mean, this did all start with them, wouldn’t you say?”

“I couldn’t rightfully say, Master Marcy.”

“Hmm...”

“Apologies, Marcy. It is hard to dispense with habits developed in servitude after so long when one finds suddenly themselves in a position of authority.”

Marcy shrugged, never having been in the position. But she didn’t really wish to think too much on it – she had her own rendezvous to make. “Thinking of you, Anne. Sash. I’ll see you both soon.”

Anne was alone, trampling already trodden turf into an even clumsier trail than when she’d previously been plodding around in the dark. Given the added benefit of light, the route she’d taken out of town was clearer to see but the night’s previous rain had left the earth and fallen tree squalid and fragile.

She’d taken a step already over a log which had been carefully slung over a wide brook but the flimsy, rot-eaten wood broke off at the rim as she reached the end and deposited her face in a muddy plash.

Wiping her face clean on a creeper, crossing her fingers that it wouldn’t give her a skin rash, she continued into the woods with her patchwork tour bag filled with ropes and posts.

Lugging around the twenty odd feet of rope was more to the open space where she built the large-ish square cage was more frustrating than the posts. The box itself didn’t need to be large for it’s intended target and wound up being only about half her height, but she reasoned that this was enough.

Hopefully.

Maybe.

Perhaps.

There were a few minutes of rooting around in the dirt trying to lather the rope connected to the pully branch holding the cage up over the canopy with the leaves as cover in mud to make it blend in but Anne finally had her trap set up.

…

And then triggered it on herself by accident, the feeble cage breaking apart as it came down over her head.

“Okay, so much for that,” she grumbled to herself.

Rope snare it was then. She had wanted to show him her growth in her trap building first if this reunion was to go the way she wanted it to but she judged a return to the very beginning would work just as well.

With his back settled into Joe Sparrow’s feathers, Sprig considered the rolling landscape below. A weird expression he mulled to himself, given that landscapes don’t actually roll. He peered down at the ground roughly a mile or two beneath him and watched – lots of hills and rivers and reservoirs but, naturally, they didn’t roll. The patches of ground, strung together as fields of inconsistent colour or shape or length or width, slotted together like a perfectly calved jigsaw puzzle.

So bucolic was it that Sprig noticed that watching it all rush under him at Joe Sparrow’s intoxicating speed was also very dizzying and so rolled back onto his back.

The dewy, reflective sheet of night started to ebb away over the ground as the sun pitched upward from behind the mounds.

Amphibia cockcrows.

They were beautiful, Sprig thought to himself, but never more so than up here above that which frog surveys. Joe Sparrow twirled his head around and chirruped. The opening to the woodland route as started to glide out before them, a rising bird fanning out it’s stiff wings to the brazen breeze or swampy sunup.

Like the gracefull gazelle of the heavens, Joe Sparrow regally set down beside the clearing and plunged his beak into a nearby pothole, withdrawing from it a long, cream-coloured worm that knew it’s duty to be a rich and nutritious morning meal. He chirruped again.

Clinging tight to his telescope in it’s leather and brass clip, Sprig slid down Joe Sparrow’s groomed plumage on his toes and stretched himself out, spread-eagling to the world like Cristo Redentor.

Joe Sparrow, once his breakfast has settled nicely into his digestive tract, wasted no time in leaving Sprig to take the rest of the journey on his own. Sprig waited until his majestic shadow was but a dot about the size of his pupil and turned to the woods. Shrugging dismissively, he hopped over the boundary and set foot into the wilderness.

Anne had once hated the cave she found herself napping in – Polly and Hop Pop had been insistent on her spending the night at the house, but she had been unwavering in her wish to see this play out exactly as she’d hoped.

The cave wasn’t difficult to reach, not anymore at least. When she’d first had to crash there in her teenage years, the cliff face it was situated on wasn’t jagged but mostly smooth, protected by a line of trees and vines that held the rain off it. But returning there a decade later, the locals had seen fit to open the area out somewhat and cleared a portion of woodland, breaking up the protection that had previously preserved the rockface.

Years later, heavy rain, wind and other natural elemental forces had chipped and eroded away the brittle stone, rendering what was once a death-trap to clamber up little more than a brisk exercise to climb, plenty of hand and footholds having come out of the chiselled precipice.

The bugs and creatures of the night seemed to have vacated the caves yonks ago, so Anne had simply turned up, slipped off her boots and socks and made a faux pillow out of her shirt. When she woke, a beam of sunlight bringing sharp colour out of her eye, she found that her shirt pillow had somehow been fashioned into a tiny head cradle, like a hammock, out of leaves rooted into the floor but emerging from her hair.

“Huh. Never thought I’d be made this welcome by a cave,” she mused, pulling herself up. She’d been worried when she went to sleep that night that the air would be humid and syrupy, that she’d rouse at dawn and her vest would be steeped in sweat, but she was graciously mistaken. She nevertheless wandered out of the cave and went to the small waterfall emerging from an opening in the upper rises of the mountain. She took a few handfuls of water to quench her thirst and then doused her whole head in the falling deluge.

Tying back her hair to ensure the straps of her vest wouldn’t get any more sodden (and wishing to get her bra damp even less, however much she needed a clean outfit), she replaced her green, work shirt and sat overlooking the gorgeous morning.

A bead of moisture curled and swam at the corner of her mouth.

It wasn’t clean water from her hair. Even though she didn’t need to, she could detect with the side of her tongue the minute hint of something like…

Salt.

She sniffed and palmed her eyes, her brow, the bridge of her nose and sniffed again.

First, she’d say hi. Second, she’d sob like she’d never sobbed before and come near to crushing his comparatively small figure in her embrace, then she’d cry some more.

AAAAARRRRGGGHHH!

Or maybe she’d first be alarmed by a bellowing thud taking down trees about a kilometre away accompanied by a scream quite poignantly deeper than the one from memory.

“No,” Anne muttered, nimbly belting for her boots and forcing her larger human feet into them with force enough to break the soles out from under her.

“No!”

Entirely on instinct, Anne leapt at a vine like Jane of the Jungle and slid, fireman-style, straight to the woodland floor, fists firmly clenched and prepared to knock seven bells out of whatever just made the pitiable decision to spoil this for her.

She sprinted over the crushed and pierced tree stumps and soil; she realised she was following a trail. Indentations in the ground with three-large triangular treads untidily digging minute trenches where the insectoid feet which stamped them in had torn them out, sending dirt or wood chips sprawling every which way.

The way she wasn’t running wasn’t unfamiliar – it was in this general area that she’d set up her quote-unquote surprise, namely the thrown together rope snare. She had, as peculiar as Anne knew it would sound to anyone who asked, intended for Sprig to be the one to set the trap off but if there was some wild animal on the prowl then an already prepared noose could function just as well for game catching.

Suddenly, she froze in place.

There was something carrying on the wind. Something painful.

It wasn’t a legitimate pain, not yet. Like the echo of a startling sound not quite yet reaching this far away.

And as if on cue, a monstrous roar…

The site of Anne’s hackneyed trap was a disaster area, unearthed components of her former attempts at a trap still peppering the ground. But to differ from when she last stood there, not hanging above the ground but with its skewed head still firmly touching it was a colossal orange mantis.

Anne already knew it was safe to approach – it hung crooked and limp, it plainly wasn’t going to get up and thrash about.

A pang trapped in her gut; she’d never wanted to kill anything with her trap.

She rubbed at her arms, overcome by a slight shiver – it was another one of those times where nature proved how brutal a mistress she could be.

Stepping over to the tree holding the noose in place, she began to work the knot loose, turning to look back at the predator before pulling clean the final cinch, “I’m sorry.”

The remainder of the giant creature’s lumbering form dropped cold to the ground. It’s large, merciless eyes glazed open; the lack of mercy present in them, presumably from when it lumbered witlessly into the snare, made Anne feel only the slightest bit better for what happened to it in the end.

A large wing flopped to the earth and sent spiralling across the dirt an immaculate golden cylinder. Landing on a clean thicket, it rolled down a bevy of leaves and tapped the side of Anne’s boot. She curiously took up the object and rubbed off a portion of grit and soil residue with her forearm, unveiling beneath it a familiar inscription.

To Sprig, [love] Anne

“Oh, my Gosh…” Anne whimpered. Ten years later and it looked a beautiful and new as the day she’d bought it for him. There appeared to be a few scuffs and scratched around the rim of the entrance pupil, like something had been clasping it for a long while and the exit lens had a minor crack in it, presumably caused by it’s encounter with the oversized mantodea.

“But, if this is here,” Anne wondered aloud, “then where’s…”

Gah!

The exclamation broke the silence of the shrubbery to Anne’s left, about forty paces.

This was it…

“Come on, come on!” Sprig panted, patting down the earth for dear life, as if willing it to come to life and bestow unto him it’s favour, “I can’t have lost it, I just can’t!”

Sprig, already on his knees, couldn’t shrink down much further. No price could be put on what that telescope meant to him and for ten years of perfect preservation of the greatest thing he’d ever received to be suddenly ended with such a trivial encounter didn’t bear thinking about.

He cradled himself, nearing close to sobbing the tears of a young child whose favourite teddy bear had vanished into the ether.

There was roughly half a mile left of woodland to cover back to town; the area he was sat in overlooked it so he could just about make out the citizens of Wartwood loose the fireflies from their nightly commission to make for their pens and begin the daily grind. With his telescope, he would have been able to see from this distance if the citizens had been keeping Anne’s monument clean and polished like they promised.

He clasped his hands into a binocular shape and tried to make it out by squinting.

“Maybe this will help?” Anne asked.

Sprig saw Anne holding the telescope as she launched it over to where he was standing and he caught it in a swift motion, giving it a compulsive scrub down, “Maybe it would,” he said, groaning at the crack over the exit pupil but raising it to his eye to peer through all the same, “thanks for finding it. Well, it looks as if they’ve keep keeping Anne’s monument-“

…

…

…

…

Nobody moved. Nobody flinched. Sprig’s grip on the telescope tightened to such an extend that were it not for it’s metal composition, he’d have crushed it. He’d stopped being able to make anything out through the telescope lens a few seconds ago but was too busy swallowing his tongue to give that the slightest notice.

Anne’s knees caved beneath her and planted her slightly painfully on the filthy ground. She herself was crying rivers.

“Caught ya,” she blubbed out, “thought you’d seen the last of ol’ Anne, huh? Well, you didn’t.”

Sprig took the telescope from his eye and placed it in its clip before placing his hands in his hair, which had grown out into a parting down the middle into two shoulder length flows, riding down the strands until they were back by his sides again.

“I had a big sister when I was a kid,” he started, “I idolised her, loved her, I thought she was my hero. But like all hero stories, it came to an end and I never saw her again.”

Anne held her breath. What was he about to say?

“And you know what else, Anne?”

…

“I have a big sister. I idolise her, love her and she’s my hero.”

…

“Now, for God’s sake, come here!”

He shot into Anne’s chest like a miniature torpedo.

The rest, as the expression went, was history.