"Starilya! Give me those!" I yelled as my rainbow Shoyru
dropped my only pair of clean socks into her brother StarSkyFire's potion.
"Starilya, those are my only clean socks! Stop
it!" With a sigh, she fished the socks out and handed them to me.
Maybe I should back up a bit first before I
start talking, though. I'm Furbyfun, owner of three somewhat crazy Shoyrus.
The oldest is Shaylily, who's disco. She's usually off doing something with
her best friend Morece2000, and although she looks like a Neopian Shoyru she's
actually from Larishi, a nearby planet where Neopets also live, and as a result
has much more magical ability than most Neopets.
Aerolani is my second Shoyru, who received a
coat of white paint last December, who likes playing in the snow or swimming
if there's none around, and always pesters me about moving to Terror Mountain
so she can play in the snow all the time. Sometimes I think maybe I should have
painted her disco. It would fit her personality, which is vaguely hippie-ish.
Whenever Shaylily, the only real battler, goes off to the Battledome, she's
always outside protesting the fight.
Starilya is my third pet, and she's rainbow.
She likes flying, which she's good at, playing pranks on people and driving
me crazy. StarSkyFire is my youngest, painted shadow, and the only boy. He spends
most of his time in his lab making all his potions and inventions and can't
stand it when Starilya messes with his equipment; he has a bit of a "short fuse"
that way.
As soon as she handed the socks to me, Starilya
flew off, leaving me standing in StarSkyFire's lab with two socks stained purple.
Since I didn't know what that potion had in it, I just took them with me as
I logged off and put them in the laundry basket once I got off the computer,
not knowing what an unfortunate time I had chosen to log off.
"Let me go!" yelled Starilya as she struggled
in the grasp of the fire Eyrie who held her. As she passed Aerolani's hut in
the Neogarden, she grabbed hold of the nearest object, which was one of her
sister's long beaded peace symbol necklaces. As the Eyrie pulled her away, the
necklace was forced off its hook and the clasp came undone, spilling pink and
green spherical beads all over the ground. The Eyrie didn't say anything; he
just tucked the screaming Shoyru under his arm and lumbered off into the forest
behind our NeoHome. The knot holding the last bead, the large, fragile peace
symbol, caught on a thorned bush.
Not noticing what had happened to the necklace
held by his captive, the fire Eyrie snapped his paw-like fingers twice and a
previously invisible Faerie Cloud Racer he'd stolen appeared. He jumped into
the cockpit and threw Starilya into the back. The purple racer then took off,
burning the surrounding trees with its engines and leaving a coloured trail
in the sky.
The next day, I logged in and found Shaylily,
Aerolani and StarSkyFire furiously searching the NeoHome and garden.
"Um, where's Starilya?" I asked Shaylily.
"She vanished yesterday, right after you logged
off, and we've been looking for her ever since. One of Aerolani's peace symbol
necklaces is missing too, although I can't see what, if anything, it has to
do with this."
Now, I know a clue when I see one, having been
dragged along on a few mysteries with Shaylily and Morece. Something told me
that Aerolani's missing necklace was a clue.
"Aerolani, which necklace was it?" I asked.
"The pink and green beaded one, with the huge
golden peace symbol on it. Why?"
I ignored her question as I stormed out to Aerolani's
'peace hut'. Sure enough, her flashy pink and green peace symbol necklace was
missing from its hook. I didn't have time too look, though, because I was bowled
over by a Baby Fireball. Azamanti, the Baby Fireball in question, bounded off
to the fence where our NeoHome met the forest behind it. I followed him, and
I saw that our wooden fence's top points were bent and there was a trail of
pink and green beads. I yelled for my pets as soon as I saw the first bead,
and they rushed to my side.
"Hey! Those beads are from my necklace!" shouted
Aerolani, and she was right. We followed the trail to a point where it seemed
to vanish, and there was a golden peace symbol stuck to a thorn bush. I pulled
it off with some effort, giving myself a painful poke in the finger in the process,
and handed it to my white Shoyru.
"The trees are all shredded," remarked Shaylily,
"I wonder why?" StarSkyFire leaned over one stump. The top was incredibly thin
and black, probably from some kind of fire.
"There are no spaceships or rockets in Neopia,
except for the space shuttle to Virtupets, and the Faerie Cloud Racers," remarked
Aerolani.
You could almost see the light bulb over Shaylily's
head as she looked in every direction.
"Shaylily, what are you doing?" asked StarSkyFire.
Wordlessly, she pointed up at the sky. Just above
the tree line was a bright purple trail, looking like someone had taken a purple
paint brush and drawn it in the air.
"I can't fly!" I shrieked as my pets took off.
Shaylily and Aerolani remembered this, though,
and swooped down behind me to pick me up.
"Furbyfun, you're heavy," complained Aerolani
as we followed the ribbon of color through the sky.
"Just be glad I'm here at all," I responded,
"and just so you know, being carried isn't exactly comfortable for me either."
Being carried by Shoyrus isn't exactly the greatest experience, even when they're
trying to be gentle with you.
We flew alongside the trail, always being careful
not to fly into it, for hours, and finally it pointed back towards the ground.
The landscape was very different here, since we had flown straight from Neopia
Central to somewhere in the mountains by the Lost Desert. The beam pointed directly
at a castle on top of one particular mountain, which had almost completely vertical
sides, but Shaylily and Aerolani just grabbed me and took off with their brother
rising beside them.
Guards stood in front of the only door, and there
seemed to be no windows. We spotted an open top on a tower, with a small opening
in the floor. Aerolani used a small, relatively (as compared to a Trumpet of
Deafening, that is) quiet blast from her Coltzan's Gem to make a hole big enough
for all of us to fit through. We climbed through the hole, me going last so
my Shoyrus could catch me, and found ourselves on a staircase with a tall ceiling.
The Shoyrus let go of me once we reached the floor, and we started to descend.
After about a million steps, we finally reached the bottom floor and immediately
ran into some guards.
One Grarrl guard shouted, "Hey! You aren't supposed
to be here!" and dragged me out of my pets' grip.
"Let me go!" I yelled, but he paid no attention.
Instead, he took me back up through the staircase
we'd come from, stopping at a door neither I nor my pets had noticed in the
middle. He unlocked it and went inside, throwing me into the small room with
the barred window. I looked out the window to see my pets being literally kicked
out of the castle by some tough-looking Draiks and landing on the ground, looking
like they'd given up.
"Furbyfun!" yelled Shaylily.
"Up here!" I shouted back. They shot up to the
tiny window at an amazing speed. As Aerolani opened her mouth to say something,
the floor under my feet gave way. "Help!" I screamed as I fell through the hole.
When I hit the bottom, I was in a dark dungeon
with two of the Draik guards, and a large pot filled with a bright white liquid.
"Owners especially shouldn't be snooping around.
Your punishment is to become an Angelpuss!" shouted one evilly. An Angelpuss?
How could they turn me into an Angelpuss? There weren't any petpet morphing
potions in existence! They didn't seem to know that, though, and tipped the
whole thing over on me. After a few minutes of having a cauldron on top of me,
making it seem like I was in a small, extremely dark and wet room with a curved
roof, they tipped it back and I had become an Angelpuss.
"It worked. Let's take her back up to the holding
room she was in, since it makes no difference." They grabbed me by the newly
pointy ears and threw me back up the tunnel. I then came back into the room
they'd put me into before, and flew up to the window.
"Furbyfun? Is that you or some other Angelpuss?
We couldn't help overhearing those guards," asked Aerolani.
I started to talk in petpet language, which I
soon realized was unintelligible to pets by the puzzled looks on my Shoyrus'
faces. I tried again, thinking that I'd heard Morece's Angelpuss speaking English
last time they came over, and this time "It's me! Furbyfun!" came out in slightly
muddled but understandable English. I described what had happened, and StarSkyFire
started fishing around in his backpack. After pulling out several other potions,
he removed a glowing red potion and uncapped it, then poured it on the bars
of the window.
The rusty metal bars melted easily, and then
he put the potion back and produced another, yellow this time, and dumped the
bottle's contents on my head. I returned to human form, but the wings lingered
and even became larger. Now I could fly! All three Shoyrus' mouths dropped open
in shock as I rocketed through the window and went into a wild flipping motion
in the air.
"I don't know how to fly!" I screamed as I stopped
spinning. Shaylily grabbed my arm and quickly showed me how to turn, speed up
and slow down. Once I'd figured out flying, we started looking through the minuscule
windows. Inside a room on the opposite tower sat Starilya, although she didn't
seem to see us looking. What we didn't see was the guards sneaking up behind
us with their nets. They grabbed the four of us by our wings and more kept coming
and holding onto us until the combined weight became too heavy for us to hold
up and we crashed to the ground.
"No one's going to kidnap Princess Starilya FallingBlue,"
said one of the identical guards, "especially not you."
"Kidnap her? She's my pet!" I shouted, but they
didn't listen.
"Great," I complained to my pets as we flew off,
"Starilya's being held by some pet that won't even let us look in her window.
Could this day get any worse?" What I didn't know was how much worse it was
going to get.
To be continued...
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