"You want to stay my friend, right? Hop up yourself!"
"Come... come on. I... it's steep, alright? I don't know why I agreed to this..."
Paint reached a helpful hand down to pull her friend up. She really did appreciate Arrowhead having stuck with her through the years, as her unusual combination of plant and animal traits wasn't conducive to her being even accepted as a harmless creature, much less well-liked. The toad was incompetent sometimes, and Paint felt she owed him to help him out at every turn, though she took similarly frequent opportunities to give him a bit of ribbing.
"Thanks," he wheezed. "I've had enough of those ledges."
"It's okay; we're almost at the top of the volcano," said Paint. "Then we won't be seeing any more of those. Except, you know, the hole, haha! Scary, huh?"
Arrowhead sighed, more than a hint of anxiety in his little toad voice. "Don't remind me. I mean, I want to see it too, but..."
"Then it's worth it! Onward we plod, I say! A noble quest for a noble pair of explorers! Paint, the visionary, with plant-like serenity to complement her foxy wits! And her trustworthy sidekick she couldn't do the job without..."
"I hate this part," muttered Arrowhead.
"Arrowhead the Toad! There's nothing they can't accomplish together: no hill they can't climb, no river they can't traverse, no pretentious existential debate they can't circumlocute their way out of!"
Arrowhead found this routine, which Paint played up on occasion, to be pretentious itself, and he wasn't all that confident in his abilities. Perhaps she was the smart one - she was certainly stronger and faster than him to boot. He knew, though, that it was just a sign of her genuinely liking him and the spirit of adventuring, and for that much he was wont to tolerate her silliness.
He wondered from time to time, this time being included, whether she harbored any buried romantic feelings for him. He wasn't sure he felt that way about her, at least not yet, but he would relish the welcome boost in self-confidence by having someone else like him as more than a pal. Actually, she was more like a sister to him - and that worked fine, for the time being. Still, as a question easy to spend far too much time musing over, it made its way into his head on occasion.
"Arrowhead, look! We're here!"
He peered his large eyes up from the ground; he'd lost attention to their physical surroundings in his reverie. He quickly, however, directed his eyes back downward, and found himself gazing into the mouth of the volcano. And the verdict was... that he was underwhelmed.
Her opinion echoed his. "Aww, it's just a bunch of rocks! Far-down rocks, but rocks! No majestic, long-lost civilizations, hidden away at the fault of their own inability to develop rock-climbing apparatuses - not even any totally awesome lava!"
He couldn't find himself disappointed, though. He did enjoy their time together, and she seemed to feel likewise.
Like Arrowhead's irritation at Paint's dramatic routine, the rocks making up the ground at the volcano's edge began to crumble. They were in deep trouble and would be in deep lava if they didn't run as fast as possible: they were facing an eruption. He knew all about these.
"Arrow, RUN!" She grabbed his hand and yanked him on the first giant and frenzied steps of a trek down the volcano. They might still be too late, but they could try to escape the imminent explosion of red-hot, molten minerals.
Toads aren't as well-suited for running as foxes are, so he did have some trouble with the activity. Suddenly, his hand left hers immediately as the first terrifying orange droplets began to rain down. He tumbled off to the side and was getting up, but would not be able to catch up to her. This was bad. The droplets were sparse, but get hit by one and you're done for.
Paint set aside her fear and sprinted back to retrieve her best friend. She succeeded and, to make the journey down plain easier, picked him up.
"Thanks, Paint. I... I'm sorry to do this to you."
"Don't worry about it," she replied with an uncharacteristic lack of emotion. Their job now was to get themselves to safety.
The droplets of death were coming down harder, and in greater numbers, now. She panicked. What could they hide under to wait the storm out? There were some trees around, but those wouldn't reliably protect them. They couldn't dig a hole in time, or deep enough, for it to matter.
Coming to a fairly short, but existing, cliff, Paint made the snap-judgment that they had no choice but to jump. It would take them the most quickly away from the line of fire.
"Arrow, forgive me for the problem I'm about to bring to you."
"What?"
She leapt. She clutched him tightly, not about to let him get injured because of her decision. Getting a quick glance at his face, Arrow gathered that he wanted to scream but either trusted her enough or was just resigned to his bitter end.
Before either one could think about it any longer, they hit the grass below. No injuries were apparent, so they kept on in a mixture of running and rolling down the remainder of the hill, whose angle had a sine value a little higher than their comfort values. They did, however, notice that they had by that point escaped the radius of the volcano's reach, the eruption seemed to be over anyway, and they weren't in the likely path of any impending lava flows.
By this point, Paint hadn't been carrying Arrowhead for a fair bit. They took the welcome chance to stop and catch their breaths. Paint did, anyway; Arrowhead had one more remark to make.
"Paint?"
"Yeah?"
"Leave the 'no hill they can't climb' part out of your spiel next time, okay?"
She chuckled, appreciating her neurotic friend keeping his composure to some degree. With that, the plant-fox and toad rekindled their paces down the mountain. No more conversation would happen, but somehow they were fine with that.