26. A Trip to the Archives

Chapter 26: A Trip to the Archives

Ever since I got to Amphibia, Frog Valley's been cut off from the rest of the word by a huge wall of ice that blocks the only pass out of the valley. Whatever hope I have of finding my friends – if they're even here in the first place; there's no guarantee they got transported here with me; or worse, they could have been sent somewhere else entirely, like some kind of magical kingdom, or a hellish realm built on the bones of a dead god, or even some kind of virtual reality simulation inside… I don't know, a train or something? Man, where do I even come up with this stuff? Right, whatever hope I have of finding them, or getting out of this crazy world lies on the other side of that ice wall.

And while I feel more at home here in Wartwood than I did before, and while I don't fee nearly as alone, I still know I can't stay here forever. I have a life to get back to.

So when HP announced that the mountain pass was only one week away from clearing, my hopes shot up… way up. I was finally going to get out of here!

And then my hopes were crushed once again. Before we leave the valley, we're going to have to do… ughhhh… research. It's every middle school paper all over again. I learned early on that all the triple-spacing, large fonts and redundant language in the world can't hide complete ignorance. Research, in my mind, was a necessary evil. But it was still evil. An evil I would do anything to avoid. But Hop Pop had a very long list of things that could potentially kill me that was pretty convincing.

Whatever problem I have with research is nothing compared to Sprig, who's convinced that the best way to deal with the unknown is to dive right into it. And while he makes something of a good point, looking back, we have a pretty bad track record of almost dying because we had no idea what we were dealing with.

The sea snake. The lampreys. The tomato monster. The Zappapedes. The mole. The hedgehogs. The love doves. The mud men. The skunk. The skunk.

No, it was time to suck it up. We're not gonna find solutions in charging in blindly. To get ahead, we were going to have to read.

C'mon, girl, you got through Bessie's manual. You can get through this.

So, turns out the archives are a lot nicer than I was anticipating. Dusty, yes, but it's pretty warm and homey, with comfortable armchairs to sit in while you read.

The homey part is because it used to be a guy's home. The place was once owned by a guy named Mycroft Newtback, an explorer, researcher, and collector, who gathered the largest repository of knowledge in the Valley before dying horribly trying to explore outside it.

Yep, research looks like the way to go here!

There didn't seem to be anyone actually working there to help us out. Turns out the place is set to open and close automatically thanks to some kind of solar-powered lock. I didn't think Amphibia had anything that advanced, but this place never fails to surprise me. Which granted, is why we came to a library in the first place.

Not much in the way of pleasure reading here, but I quickly found the section on "dangerous creatures". As you could imagine, it took up several bookcases. I decided to start with The Dunderhead's Guide to Carnivorous Reptiles, figuring I should stick with beginner's works for the time being. At the beginning, Sprig was bugging me to ditch the books and go off on a real adventure, but he eventually stopped. I assume he finally found himself a book, which is fine by me. The last thing I need are distractions.

Before I even realized it, hours had passed, and it was lunchtime already. I guess time flies when you're really invested in a book, and nothing makes you more invested than when your survival's on the line.

And there's a ton of information in this place. Like, did you know that when confronted by the Common Mountain Vole, the best course of action is to lie flat on the ground because they can't look down? Or that the Greater Three-Tusked Cave Rat can be distracted by mimicking its mating call? Or that the Speckled Tree Slug is allergic to juniper berries?

But right now my brain was full and my stomach was empty. I could really go for a grub dog. Or a cricket salad on rye…Yep, research could wait.

One problem. The door… the door that's supposed to lock and unlock automatically, was locked. And unless there was a solar eclipse happening that no one knew about, that shouldn't be happening.

That is, it wouldn't be happening if someone hadn't stolen the lens from the locking mechanism in some misguided attempt to provide us with an adventure. Sprig. I'm talking about Sprig. And it didn't help that he accidentally broke the lens so we couldn't put it back.

So that's it. We were locked in, probably no one was going to find us, and we had nothing to look forward to but starving to death. Adventure is soooo fun.

The door was built solidly, so any attempt to force it open failed. We tried to dig our way out, but the ground was infested with very large, very aggressive worms. HP had the admittedly pretty brilliant idea of trying to replace the lens with his glasses, but his prescription's so high that he just set a big chunk of the library on fire. Hope there was nothing important in any of those books!

We were stuck when I finally realized we did have a way out… the skylight. If we could get up there, one of us could wriggle out and either go for help of fin a way to lift the others out. I was the tallest, so I figured I had the best shot of reaching it. We built a tower out of the books we hadn't accidentally incinerated, and I climbed up and managed to full myself up. Unfortunately, being big enough to reach the top also meant I was too big to fit through… but just big enough that my big fat head got stuck. Which meant that I couldn't get out, nobody else could get out, and that I was abut to be dinner for some hungry cicadas. Are cicadas meat-eaters? I never got to the chapter on cicadas, but I was't exactly keen to learn the hard way.

I'm not sure what happened afterwards, but somehow Sprig got out and drove off the cicadas. Shortly afterwards, HP and Poly showed up too, saying they took the pipes. Which explained how Sprig got out. He flushed himself down the… well, I don't think I need to write it down.

Anyway, Sprig seemed pretty pleased with himself. He'd proved that jumping in worked! Except for one thing, which I pointed out to him… we wouldn't have gotten into the situation in the first place if he hadn't messed with the lock. I explained to him that this wasn't just about us goofing off. This was serious. And we were going to have to do things the right way, even if it wasn't the way we were used to.

We would have hugged it out at that point but that's when the archive roof caved in and we fell back inside. Hop Pop rounded up a rescue party to get us out, but the archives are going to be out of commission for a while. So much for research. I guess we're gonna be staying put for a little while yet…

A.N.: So, it feels like some of these episodes were out of order. "Bizarre Bazaar" seems like it's set right after this episode, but there are a bunch of episodes in between the two. I'm going to go with that episode being set after a second visit, after the damage done in this episode was repaired.

Schweenieboy: Actually, I kinda like that they developed Mayor Toadstool beyond the corrupt mayor stereotype as the series went on.

Jose: Yep, politics are a dirty business.

MarMarFaAnne: Funny you should mention that table read… *evil chuckle*

Marcy's more of a Cynthia Coven fan when it comes to YA wizard school-based novel series, but she probably has at least a passing familiarity with the GWA series. And yep, that's a Ducktales reference.

Next: Snow Day