Neoplay: Two Faeries and a Wannabe Evil Overlord - Part Five

"In... in..." She couldn't say it. Invisible? No, no, that couldn't be right. She had no powers. Even the doctor that tested her for them said she didn't, and Lucy had made sure she'd gotten one of the best! "I did not! I have no powers!"

     "Then how did that pink dude not see us?!" Cera asked, getting really frustrated. "You know what, fine." She turned around to go back out the door they had come in from. The one thing she hated was being lied to, she had too many bad experiences with lies from... other people, and she wasn't going to tolerate it again.

     "No, Cera, wait a second!" cried Ara, equally frustrated. She wasn't about to let the only person she ever thought could be a friend hate her. In her frustration, the air around them shook, and seemed to seal off all the doors. Cera jumped when the door slammed shut, and turned angrily to face Ara again. "Can't we just talk reasonably about this? I'm not lying to you! How can I lie about something when I'm oblivious to the truth?" She sighed. "When I was younger, Mom went and had my sisters and me tested for magic from the best in Neopia at that time. It cost her a lot just to hear that my sisters tested positive and I negative. I honestly did not know I could make things invisible. I promise!"

     "All right, well, if that's true, then tell me: how did my suitcase get fixed, how did that door just close, how can you hear so well, and how did we become invisible?!"

     "I don't know! Obviously I have some sort of powers, but I DIDN'T know, okay?! I didn't know then, but I know now!"

     Silence passed between the two for several seconds. Cera closed her eyes and let out a big sigh, trying to calm herself down a bit. She broke the quiet with, "I'm sorry." Realizing that she'd lost her temper there for a moment, she decided to explain. "I just can't stand people who lie, or people who I think are lying," she confessed, walking back toward Ara. Stupid Dhia, she growled to herself.

     Ara held up her hands. "Hey, I hear you," she said. "I hate liars. That's one of the many reasons I despise pirates—they're dirty, filthy liars. I had this friend, or at least I thought she was my friend. Her name was Janelle, and we were eight." She felt a hotness form in her eyes as she recalled the painful experience. "She seemed all nice and everything, and I told her my secrets which she'd promise to keep, and she told everybody. She lied to me, and then when I was confronted by her friends, I... I realized that we'd never really been friends, and I stopped talking to her. Actually, more than that—I attacked her. I beat her up real good before the principal came and took me away, and then Mom packed us up and we moved back to Mystery Island."

     Cera looked up and just had to laugh. "I see," she said, but then stopped smiling. "I have had worse experiences." She scowled, remembering the crash, the island, and that twisted, lying con-artist that had planned to rob her and leave her for dead. She'd been terribly wrong to trust him. She looked back at Ara. "It was a long time ago, though. So, umm, about this machine...?"

     "Yeah, what do you think it does?" Ara asked, glad the subject had changed and Cera wasn't angry at her anymore. Somehow, she cared and didn't like it when Cera was mad at her, the same when Lucy was mad at her, unlike her uncaring indifference toward anyone else that was mad or yelling at her. She hated to disappoint her owner, and for some reason she didn't want to disappoint Cera either. Is this what it feels like to have a real friend? she wondered silently. She'd never really had one before, aside from Lucy, but she didn't count. "You know, other than turning pets pink?"

     Cera examined the buttons and everything closely and then went to look in the barrels that the two other pets had left. "Hmmm, let's see..." She rolled one of the empty barrels into where the ray would fire and then went back to the console where all the buttons were. She looked at all the buttons and finally pushed one. The ray fired, and the barrel slowly turned pink. The ray shut off, and there was nothing different about the barrel other than its color. Cera went to the barrel and swiped a finger across it but the coloring didn't come off.

     "Hmm." Arathyne frowned. "This is too bizarre to just be for changing color."

     The doors flew open and two pink Grarrls came out, followed by a large amount of unpainted pets with their heads down and chains on their ankles and wrists. Cera spun sharply around when the door opened and grew breathless. Ara turned back to see them and gasped. They were on another side of the machine with some pets to zap. Suddenly, an idea struck in Ara's mind. "Wait a minute—" She grabbed Cera by the upper arm and whispered, "You're a faerie, aren't you?"

     "Last time I checked I was," she said quickly, but then figured out what Ara's idea was. Or, at least, she thought she did. She looked over at the Grarrls and then back at Ara, and before the Xweetok could explain anything, Cera was saying loudly, "See, all it does is change color!" She pretended that she was demonstrating the machine for Ara. She looked over at the Grarrls. "Oh, sorry, my friend didn't think that the machine just changed color." She hoped the Grarrls were too stupid to catch on.

     Ara mentally kicked herself. This was not her plan at all. She had planned to attempt to turn herself invisible then follow Cera wherever she and the other regular-colored pets were taken. She herself did not want to be pink, and by the freaky, glazed look in the zapped pets' eyes, she had a strange feeling it was more than just a change of color. But maybe Cera had a smarter plan, so she decided to just go on with it. Growing up with Lucy, you either had to understand acting or you were lost. It helped to be good at it. And aside from her owner, Arathyne was the best at it.

     "Hey, you're faeries!" the first Grarrl pointed out. "Why aren't you girls with the other unzapped pets?"

     "Uhhh... because... I just got here?" Ara answered dumbly. Maybe if they think I'm stupid, they'll be more lenient, she thought. She decided to talk like she was highly uneducated. "I saw this Bori here; she seems real smart, but I'm not know what this big gray thing does. She is telling me."

     "Um, yeah, we should get to the end of the line," Cera said, now panicking. What was Ara doing? But she kept improvising. "All these other pets have been waiting and it is only right that we go to the end. Here, let me make sure you can get there." She grabbed Ara's arm and dragging her out to the door that the other pets just came through. She hoped the plan in her head would work, because she accidentally crushed Ara's.

     "Dude, what's your plan?" Ara whispered into Cera's ear as she was dragged out. "I'm really confused here."

     She didn't answer her. The line to the ray was pretty long, which was good, and there were, strangely, no guards at the end. Cera kept dragging Ara passed the end of the line and through the hallway. "Well, we got away from those guys," she said looking around for an exit now. She hadn't really thought this all the way out, she just wanted to get away from the Grarrls before they were discovered, but now that they were away from them, she didn't know what to do.

     "Where do you think you're going, little missies?" A pink Mynci stood over them, an eyebrow raised.

     Cera was about to reply with "the bathroom", but Ara put a stupid grin on her face and answered before she could. "Hey, I can do that with my eyebrow too! Check it out." She lifted the left one and the right one went down. "Pretty cool, huh? Not many folks I know can do that."

     The Mynci rolled his eyes. "You obviously have no intelligence, so you couldn't possibly be of any harm." To Cera he said, "And you, didn't we put all the Bori on the other side of the H.Q.? So why are you still here?" He grumbled something that Ara caught as, "You stupid Bori." Ara growled, sudden anger firing up in her. The Mynci gripped Cera's upper arm firmly and pulled her out of the room.

     The tingling feeling returned in a flash of white-hot heat and Ara zipped towards the door, just barely squeezing through it as it slammed shut. She didn't seem to have legs, or arms or anything. Actually, she was really no more than air.

To be continued...