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Wow,” sighed Rui.
She was flipping through the pages of the pressed flower collection, that had violets, pansies, petunias, and wildflowers pressed to the crème-colored pages. The girls had decided on crème because the colors would show better than plain white, and would also give the flowers a more elegant tinge.
Amber was also in the tree house, checking the flowers that were being pressed within several large Webster Dictionaries, witch were piled on top of each other. The new flowers would go to the bottom dictionary, and the ones that had been pressed for a few days would go on the top. Occasionally, the girls would sit on the pile, carefully balancing themselves and reading a book, but it wasn’t their favorite thing to do. The other two were looking for new flowers to be added to the pile.
“Careful Rui, we’ve spent all summer on that!” said Amber, with a small smile. The dried, pressed flowers were rather brittle, and would crumble if the pages were bent too much.
“Okay Amber,” said Rui somewhat absent-mindedly; she was absorbed in the beautiful colors.
Then, they both heard the patter of feet breaking twigs and crunching leaves, and Rui was instantly alert, purple balls of light at her hands. She jumped, and hovered, ready to throw the balls of light. Amber grabbed the elf’s feet and pinned her to the floor.
“Oi Rui, calm down!” said Amber. “It’s just Jenna and Karen!”
“Oh,” said Rui, slightly shamefaced. “Sorry.”
Jenna and Karen were indeed, standing beneath the tree house window.
“Hey Amber!” Karen yelled. “Grab the basket, would you?”
“Sure!” Amber yelled back. “One sec, I need to put this flower back!”
The girls kept a basket in the tree house. It had a long rope attached to it, so the basket could be lowered down to the ground. Amber lowered it on top of Jenna’s head by ‘accident’, so Karen quickly grabbed Jenna’s flowers before she could drop them, and put them in the basket. Then, they started climbing up the rope ladder, the basket traveling up past them. Karen got to the tree house first, and said hi to Amber. She gave Rui a look and said, “What happened to you Rui? When we were coming towards the tree house, you looked like you were ready for a battle or something.”
“Yeah,” said Jenna. “I noticed that too. Is there something you aren’t telling us Rui?”
The girls hated themselves when Rui looked down at her little shoes with guilt. She looked so fragile and pathetic.
“I’m sorry guys. I can’t tell you anything right now,” she whispered. There was a small, very small little splash, as something hit the floor. Rui, from the past twelve hours they had known her, did not seem like one to cry easily to the girls, yet here she was, crying silently, the only hint of it was her small shoulders shaking ever so slightly with sobs, and the small, more frequent splashes on the wood and her shoes. The girls were frozen. Something was happening, and they wanted to know what, because it was something really big, but Rui couldn’t tell them. Not yet.
Another moment, and then the girls glanced at each other and gave tiny nods. No more pressuring Rui, as they just had. She would tell them when it was time.
~*~
It was another beautiful day, but there was rain forecasted on the news, and it was hot and humid. The girls decided to go to the twins’ house, about four blocks away, and spend the day there. The twins’ were good with animals, and they had lots of pets, and also their parent’s owned a pet shop. The twins’ family actually lived in an apartment on top of the pet shop.
The pet shop itself was always exciting. There was everything you would ever need for your pet, and the girls enjoyed browsing every now and then. Karen owned a puppy herself, so all of them were allowed to help themselves to a few things once in a while.
Then there were the pets themselves. There were traditional dogs and cats of course, and then mice, hamsters, guinea pigs, and, like, everything. There were iguanas and some lizards, and then there were all types of snakes, though none were venomous of course. There were several types of parrots (all of them squawked really loudly, and some talked), little canaries, parakeets, and everything, including the pets, were in bountiful quality.
“Hey, do you want to see the new puppies? They arrived a couple of days ago,” asked Jenna.
“O…okay” stammered Rui. She had never seen anything like this before, and was wishing for about ten more eyes right now, and was whirling around every-which way at every new sound.
“Calm down Rui, we’ll take you on a tour. The store’s closed today, and Mom and Dad are out for the day,” assured Amber.
“Th-there’s just so much to see!” stammered Rui.
“It shouldn’t take more than a couple hours you know,” remarked Karen.
Rui was astounded by the life and wonders on this planet. A small, burning sensation was in her mind though. She did not want to do her job anymore. She didn’t want to betray her newfound friends; they were the best she ever had. She was forever being pushed around by her thirty-six sisters, and she had never known anyone outside the Hollow. Not even the birds would eat or come near the Hollow, there was just too much magic hanging like static everywhere. She was too young to go outside the Hollow too. She especially did not want to help the Lady do the disaster that would befall this World. She just couldn’t. She couldn’t betray these friends. Karen, Amber, and Jenna’s faces swam in her mind’s eye. Rui pushed the thoughts away. Nothing of that now. Nothing of that ever.
Rui had a full scale tour of the pet shop. She rode the guinea pigs just like a bareback horse, and treated them just like that, a horse. She stroked their heads and whispered soft words that none of the girls could hear, and then the guinea pigs would let her ride them, although she was a bit big. She was, however, content to enjoy the snakes, the dogs, and the cats from a safe distance, which meant outside the cages. The birds were a different matter. She squawked just about as loudly as them, at them, while covering her ears, and was extremely offended when one of the more vulgar parrots named Mattie, that the twins had decided to keep, started swearing and said she was ugly when she had squawked hello. The girls had to pull Rui out of the bird room by her heels, and that was a lot easier said than done. Rui was surprisingly resistant, being able to stay in place even when all of Jenna and Amber’s weight combined weighed on her ankles, and was ready to let fly with a whole new language of cursing (her native language, Elvanueto), and she knew lots good ones in English too. (Elvanueto is not really a language which you can speak fluently. It is more a language that is used as a channel for magic, but there are curse words, and some words which make it easier to cobble understandable sentences together.) All three of the girls used their best efforts, and managed to drag Rui to the supply closet, and locked her in, until she calmed down. They heard her swearing inside the closet, and then Karen, Jenna, and Amber were all doubled over with laughter, and finally, a half an hour later, Amber managed to calm down enough to unlock the door. At the sight of Rui sulking on the framed picture of Mattie, the girls were set off again. With a fantastic leap, Rui dived into Jenna’s voluminous pocket, just as the store bell rang, and Amber and Jenna’s parents came home.
Jenna’s mom and dad weren’t surprised that Karen was there, and that the girls were silly with laughter. They found them like this often enough. Karen ended up staying for dinner, which was heated pizza and homemade french-fries. Rui was using up all her strength to resist that smell, but even so, Jenna felt her wiggling impatiently.
After eating, the girls and pocket stowaway went to Amber’s room to talk. They needed to figure out what to do next about Rui. Amber had a very nice room. She had a willow tree painted on the corner where her bed was, a desk and several shelves above it on the opposite end of the room, and a window about five feet off the foot of her bed. At the remaining wall, there was the door, and her closet. The floor was covered in a rather mushy lavender carpet that was the same color as the parts of walls that did not have paintings-in-progress on them. Amber loved to paint when she had spare time, and the willow tree was her masterpiece. It looked just like a real willow tree, with gracefully curving branches, and slender, red-tinted leaves. A small sparrow perched on the top branch, looking at the world below. Amber had always claimed that by the time she was finished with her room, there would be a small forest in her walls.
“I have a doll’s bed that you could sleep on. It’s really soft, and has a patchwork cover. It’ll fit under the bed, just in case anybody comes in,” offered Amber, while digging through her closet to find the bed.
Rui started to remind Amber that she didn’t need to sleep, but then her stomach gave off a loud rumble.
“Oh, if you can wait for like… a couple minutes Rui, we can go downstairs and get you a slice of pizza; heated and everything. Mom and Dad won’t mind” said Jenna.
Amber snorted. “Yeah, they won’t even remember we exist by then!”
There was an awkward silence.
“Is pizza that good smell which almost drove me crazy earlier?”
“That’s the one.”
“I can wait then!” Rui was licking her lips as she said this, and then Jenna and Amber burst out laughing at the same time.
The group grinned at each other.
There was a sudden knock on the door, and Rui hid behind Jenna just before the twins’ mom, wearing maroon-colored lipstick, a faint touch of blush, a silvery dress and a matching hat, walked in. “Karen? Your mom called sweetie, and she wants you to come home. Amber, Jenna, Dad and I have a movie to go to with some old college friends. Do you girls promise to come home from Karen’s house right away, do your chores and go straight to bed, no two person slumber party, and only a little TV?” It could not have been plainer that this speech of rules had been rehearsed many times, due to the fact that Amber, with her back to her mother, had been mouthing the words along with her.
“Yes mother,” chorused the twins in sing-song voices.
“Good. You can walk Karen home, and then remember to come straight home! The keys will be under the welcome mat, don’t eat too much candy, and bed at 10:30 or earlier. Understand dearies?”
“Yes mother,” the twins chorused again in the same voices.
“Don’t forget to brush your teeth and take good showers. Don’t watch too much TV, or forget to do your chores, or to come home from Karen’s house right away, or—“
“Mom, you’re starting to repeat yourself,” Jenna sighed, in the exact spot that she did every night.
“Oh my, I am? Sorry girls. Karen, you have a goodnight, okay?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Okay then. See you girls later!”
The door shut with an ominous, unnaturally loud boom.
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