37. Children of the Spore

Chapter 37: Children of the Spore

I don't know why, but lately I've had all this pent-up energy, and, I dunno, it's just made me more… I guess the word you'd use is "rambunctious?" The kind of word you'd use to describe a hyperactive toddler, but that's really the only way I'd describe it.

So, this morning, I decided to teach Sprig about kickball, and then Polly wanted to play, despite her obvious problems with kicking much of anything. She does make a pretty good ball, though.

I'm kidding! Although she did volunteer to try it. But no, we stuck to using a real ball, with a few creative changes to the rules. And, you know, things will happen, windows will get broken, and next thing you know, Hop Pop's yelling at you.

Lately, he's been working on this ship model, and he's gotten very protective of it. And defensive; don't you dare call it a toy in front of him (which is stupid. My dad's got plenty of toys. Nothing wrong with it).

We switched over to tongue-tag at this point, because after kickball it was only fair to switch to something I have a natural disadvantage at. During the game, things got a little heated, and we kiiiinda broke the toy boat just a teeny bit.

HP was pretty distraught about the whole thing, and it probably didn't help that we were doing doughnuts with Bessie while he was buying glue at Loggle's, though to be fair the ol' girl needed the exercise. After that, we promised that we'd try to behave for the rest of the day.

Of course, saying something isn't the same as doing it. By the time we got home, we were starving and we all went for the one Beetle Bite left in the pantry, bumping into Hop Pop and making him drop the boat. And frog, was he mad. I don't think I've ever seen him that mad. The three of us decided that we were going to stay far, FAR out of his way for the rest of that day. Because we were already pushing our luck.

The next day… it's kind of hard to describe.

I'm pretty sure I woke up in the morning… and I'm vaguely aware of eating breakfast… and I think we went out to play some scytheball at one point… yeah, I'm pretty sure Anne Boonchuy did all those things, but there was this weird feeling like I was… disconnected from myself. Like I was there, sort of, but not really, and in any case I wasn't driving. It was almost like what I figure being a zombie would feel like, if there was such a thing…

I finally came to my senses late that afternoon, feeling like I was waking up from some kind of waking sleep, as if that makes any sense. From what I could tell, Sprig and Polly had been going through something similar themselves. What had happened to us, we had no idea… all we knew is that it had left us with a ton of pent-up energy that needed to be released, like a can of soda that had just been shaking nonstop for hours.

We were going to let it out with a quick and rowdy game of tongue-tag, but HP was still working on his boat model and bribed us with ten coppers apiece to go right to bed. Nervous energy was one thing, but money is money and given how tight HP usually is, we weren't missing an opportunity to take advantage of his sudden burst of generosity. Besides, this whole weird zombie mode thing from today was probably just a one-off.

BRAAAAAAIIIIIINS…

Nah, just messing with you, journal! But for reals, I actually was a zombie for a while there! Along with most of the rest of Wartwood.

From what we eventually managed to drag out of Hop Pop, here's what happened: while buying glue at Loggle's, HP was complaining about us kids, whereupon this creepy stranger called "Apothecary Gary" approaches him and offers him this purple gunk that was supposed to make kids behave. We managed to annoy him to the point that he actually used the stuff on us while we were asleep, which is why we woke up in zombie mode. When the stuff wore off he used it one more time, just to give himself enough time to finish the boat, which is when the three of us went full zombie, shambling, groaning, the whole shebang. Turns out the gunk was actually parasitic mushroom spores… kinda like that video game, What's Left of Us. Marcy calls it part of the "Sad Dad Game" genre. Anyway, Apothecary Gary himself was actually this giant evil mushroom that was puppeting this poor helpless frog (we later learned that his name was Lloyd and he was part of this family that used to be a big deal in the valley but fell on hard times and now they ran a banana stand or something), and while all this was going on he'd infected all the rest of Wartwood with his spores to create his own army.

[Sasha: Ohhhh…so that's where they came from...]

Anyway, they (and we) were about to assimilate HP, when he sacrificed his model boat to open up Bessie's stable. See… Bessie likes mushrooms. A lot. And we were a free buffet right there. So she ate all the mushrooms right off of us. It kinda tickled a bit. Girl's probably gonna need to work all it off, but I guess an eating jag is okay if it saves the town.

So HP turned us into zombies, but since we'd been worse than usual up until that point, the three of us decided to drop it…. At least until we want to use it to guilt him when we really want something…

A.N.: Couldn't resist an Arrested Development (the show this time) reference, since we had Tony Hale on board…

Jose: Yeah; notice what got Anne to trust Tritonio was a moment of genuine honest (well, to an extent) engagement. I have a feeling that had one of her teachers made more of an effort to meet her hallway, she could have been a better student.

Next: I take a short break, but then we head into the season's home stretch with Anne of the Year!