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Sarah and Dip Go on a Trip
Harold's inhaling was creating a strange vortex of blowing dust and rocks.
"Uuhhhmmm... Dip? ... Dip?! We're taking Belle's offer, right?"
Sarah was looking at Harold, feeling more than a little worried, and having trouble staying on her own two feet with the boisterous air pushing and pulling her this way and that.
"Well..." Dip answered. Something in her tone made Sarah look at her and she had the naughtiest little Pixie grin on her face that Sarah found both beautifully charming but, right at that moment, also very scary.
"Dip, you can't be serious! Who knows where we'll end up!"
"Yo..aaahhhh... You two bettaaaaaaaaaahhhhhh... better hurreeeeaaauuuhhhh..." Harold was saying, getting pinker by the second.
"What, don't tell me giants aren't into adventure! ... It looks like he's facing the direction we need to go in, anyway!"
Sarah looked at Belle, thinking this would probably be that last time she'd get to ride on the back of a Hummingbird.
"No way, Dip! A hummingbird could have us across the whole garden in less than a minute! We should take this -"
"Uh-oh, too late!" Dip shouted, and rushed towards Sarah, hugging her tight.
Indeed, it was too late. Harold had heldhis terrific sneeze in for as long as he could. The last thing Sarah remembered seeing was Belle flitting upwards really fast to avoid Harold's mighty expulsion, and then the world became a sudden blur of streaky darkness... She thought she was screaming but couldn't tell with the roaring air overwhelming her senses.
Sarah braced herself for an impact that never came. It felt like a long time before she was finally able to tell up from down again.
She carefully opened her eyes to find herself lying on her back, with Dip lying on top of her, looking right into her eyes, grinning insufferably. Those beautiful eyes though...! Sarah thought.
"Dip... What... What happened? Are we-?"
"I told you we'd be fine!" Dip said, apparently very pleased with herself.
"But how...? How are we just lying here? Didn't we just jet through the air at a thousand miles an hour? I thought we'd at least break a leg or something when we landed!"
Dip sat up, still sitting on Sarah, now looking at her quizzically. "Break a leg? What... Why on earth would we break a leg? The worst that could have happened would be getting a bruise or two, but thanks to my magic bubble, we landed as softly as a baby finch's tail feather!"
Confused, Sarah sat up too, propping herself up by the elbows. "Huh? Uhm, okay, I think falling works differently somehow at this size... And... Magic bubble you say? What magic bu-"
But Sarah was unable to finish her sentence. The world was suddenly so bright and... alive somehow.
"Uhm... Dip..."
Dip had noticed, too. She was already on her feet and slowly turning about, looking at everything. "Sarah, I will tell you about my magic, promise, but right now, there's something else you need to know..."
"Dip! I thought it was still night time... We weren't knocked out for that long, were we?"
"Oh, it IS still night time..."
Sarah tried really hard to listen to what Dip was saying but there were a million little marching lights all around, distracting her, making tiny little trumpet sounds that collectively made the oddest, rhythmic hum-hum sound... humm, humm HUMM HUMMM HUM HUM HUM...
It was all she could do to just stand there and, mesmerized, watch as the little lights hummed their way up her legs, crawling all over her. A faraway thought from her brain asked whether she should be scared, but she giggled at it. Dip, on the other hand, was looking very worried as she looked at Sarah, trying to beckon her to follow her towards the base of a large, green wall of some kind. She was right there, but looked somehow so very far away, too.
"I'll walk and you catch me, 'kay Dip?" Sarah managed before attempting to take a step towards her but missing the ground entirely.
"Sarah!" Dipity screamed before just catching her. "Don't worry, Sarah, I gotcha... It's Harold's sneeze... My bubble didn't go up in time so we got a full blast of his funguice."
Sarah could hear Dip's words, but they wiggled about in such a strange way that she decided it'd be better to set them free.
"I can't resist it for much longer... Sarah, please just help me here... Sarah? Oh fleez... Sarah! Kick! okay? Kick your legs! Kick!"
And so between Dip's tipsy pulling and Sarah's fitful kicking, they eventually got to the base of a tulip stalk.
Once leaning against the stalk, Dip tried to assess where they were. I think we must have been sneezed right over the stoney gorge and into the deeper parts of the Grassy Wilds. she thought... And then keeping track of her thoughts started becoming difficult, even for her, who was not unfamiliar with funguice's many interesting effects and side-effects.
"Look, Dip! The Fairy Queen! She's coming down to us, Dip! Although you didn't tell me that fairies had tentacles!"
Dip smiled, at Sarah and at her own visions - she knew the nearby rock pile was just a rock pile, but right this minute the rocks were smiling and waving at her. "Protect Sarah, Dip!" they seemed to be saying to her telepathically. "Protect her, and be her friend. Also, please come tickle us... We like being tickled, Dip!"
Sarah begun giggling as Dip started tickling her, and then Dip started laughing too. I hope we fall asleep fast... Dip thought. This is fun, but we can't be attracting attention to ourselves.
And fall asleep they did, eventually. Later in her life, Sarah would always get sudden memories coming back to her of that night... The way the stars spoke to her by realigning themselves into hieroglyphics...; how gremlins found them and stole all their clothes even as they chased them about futilely, but then threw them back again before disappearing in puffs of purple smoke...; how Dip's warm body on her back felt like love itself, pulsing into her...; these and a hundred more visions and feelings.
But when they awoke in the morning, with the sun beaming down on them, neither remembered much of anything.
"Sarah! Sarah, get up! Come look at this!"
Dip was standing at the top of the rockpile, back turned to her, look towards the Kingdom.
"Uhm... Dip? Why... Why are you wearing my dress as a cape?"
Dip spun around and looked at Sarah, noticing for the first time that she was naked, and blushed a little. "Oh! Uhm.. I, uhm..." Dip quickly whipped the dress off and threw it down to her. "I actually don't know... Sorry!"
Sarah put on her dress, which was rather dirty now, before saying, "And could you please come down here? All this shouting is making my head hurt!"
"Haha! That would be the funguice! But, no no, Sarah, you need to come up here and see this! I think we have a way up the great wall! Could be dangerous, but it'll definitely be a lot of fun!"
Sarah climbed up with some difficulty and joined Dip at the top. Her eyes opened wide at the beautiful spectacle before here... A shiny, glittering matrix of glass tubing arced from nearly where they were standing, up over a few tulip flowers, all the way to a line of distant dark spires that seemed impossibly tall. A flash of insight made her realise: It's a spiderweb! And those spires... That was the old metal fence!
"So what do you think?" Dip asked, grinning.
"I think I want to know what you were doing with my dress..." Sarah quipped, only half-joking.
Dip laughed, "I could ask you the same thing about my cap..."
Only then did Sarah realise she was wearing Dip's green cap. She took it off and looked at it quizzically before handing it back with a "let's just forget it" kind of expression on her face.
"So Sarah... We need to get over the Great Wall, okay? And my magic is great for many things, but climbing vertical surfaces as high as that, or these tulips here, is tricky. If we had a goblin, now, then we'd get up the wall in no time..."
"Yeah, or even a Hummingbird... If only we had one of those, hmm?" Sarah poked Dip in the ribs.
"Yes yes, ok!" Dip laughed, "I know that was my fault. But hey! We had fun last night, didn't we?"
"Honestly, I'm not sure what we had..."
"'Point is, we're here and we're alive and now we must go on! And my idea is, that we use this web here to get up to the Spire Line, and from there have a better perspective to decide what to do before jumping down off the other side!"
"But Dip... This is a spider web. What about the spider? I've seen what they do to anything they find in their webs..."
"Oh, no worries there! I happen to be good friends with this particular spider!" Dip said proudly.
Sarah wondered if there was anyone in the garden Dip didn't know, but was still not sure about this spider-web idea. The spider might know Dip, but it certainly didn't know her... What if they got separated? She just didn't like it and thought hard for a different idea. She was getting better at visualising where they were now... This was her garden after all. So she tracked the Spire Line (the fence) all the way to the left, and saw that it ended where it met her impossibly gigantic house. Then she remembered the tap and hose in the corner!
"Wait, Dip! I think I have a better idea. If we go that way," she pointed, "we'll find the garden hose! I was using it just yesterday to water the vegetable patches. We could totally use that to get over the great wall!"
Dip squinted in the direction Sarah was pointing to. "I don't know, Sarah... These are the Grassy Wilds, different from the grass we were in when I shrank you. Travelling will be much more difficult and there are dangerous things in here... Spiders I don't know, for instance, and other, much worse things..."
Sarah looked back at the web again, shivering and the thought of being caught and eaten. But looking at her friend's expression as she stared over through the Grassy Wilds made her think perhaps she should follow Dip's advice - this was her world, after all, and she seemed to know it very well...
Patience, young toadstool!
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