Chapter Seven: The Rising
Clay and Kimiko had been dragged away by the worms and hidden in a cave somewhere on the Circle of Fire.
"I think Dojo's on this island!" Kimiko said.
"Yeah." Clay agreed. "But these dag'nab geckos ain't about to just let us go."
Escape from the small cave seemed futile. The worms had taken their Shen Gong Wu and stripped the Silver Manta Ray of all of its technology. Not only that, the only way out was a mammoth slab of stone that no one except for some kind of giant could budge.
Kimiko thought for a few seconds, and then said, "Maybe I can use my computer find Dojo."
The worms had not noticed her technology, and weren't able to sniff out the mega-battery cell inside her miniaturized laptop computer. She turned on the machine, hurrying through the startup sequence so that she could go on the Internet.
"Really, Kimiko," Clay said. "I don't think that there's anything on the Internet about a mystical uncharted island in the middle o' nowhere--,"
Kimiko smiled sweetly as she turned the glowing laptop towards him. "10,000 hits for 'kanojo cho' and 'northern cho-cho'. And it looks like there's even a Google map of his island!"
Clay's jaw dropped. "Well, I'll be darned…"
That map depicted a volcanic island in the Pacific Ocean. It was dotted with volcanoes, and had the words, 'Here be dragons' printed on it near what looked like a miniature version of the Grand Mesa.
"The Mountains of Everywhere," Clay said as he pointed to an enormous craggy mountain that seemed to hover between the island and the surrounding water. Splitting the mountain firmly in the middle was a chasm that seemed to go down so deep that even the cartographers hadn't been able to map it completely.
Kimiko zoomed in on the mountain. A tiny text box popped up, saying, 'Dragoncircle' and 'Dragon's Dance' over and over again.
"What does that mean?" asked Kimiko.
"I don't know." Clay replied. "But I think we really need to get out of here and get to those mountains."
Kimiko nodded. "Yes. You're right. And I think I have a plan."
Dojo was already on said mountain, and was looking around in surprised horror as Nessie was chasing Jack Spicer at the edge of the left spire of the mountain. Her magic spells were disrupting the mountain, making it warp and twist in order to accommodate her sorcery. And Jack…well, he was on fire. Figuratively, of course, for the time being.
The evil boy genius leapt, ducked, and weaved in ways that Dojo didn't think he could move. Nessie's spells were always one step behind him, but the fact that he wasn't paste by now was still a miracle in and of itself.
"What are you doing?" Dojo demanded as he changed back to his normal shape. "That's not Cha—The Enemy?"
Nessie craned her head towards him, giving Jack a momentary opportunity to cartwheel out of sight into a cave just below the tip of the mountain. "What do you mean? That is the same man from all of the wood cuts and cave paintings that the Elders have shown us for decades!"
Dojo scratched his head. He couldn't see how Nessie had managed to conflate Jack Spicer and Chase Young. "Listen to me!" He called. "Chase Young is the master of evil! The guy you're chasing around right now…not so much!"
Nessie seemed even more bewildered than Dojo was. She seemed about to say something to him when she heard the hum of Jack's heli-bot as he rose slowly out of the cave. "I have you now!" She shrieked, and the boy was dragged backward by an invisible force. Before he could do anything in response, she conjured a cage made of rock that trapped him in.
"C'mon, Dojo, we have to go back to the Elders." Nessie said. "The Enemy did some sort of weird magic on Tiamat and we need to get them here to take it off."
Dojo's confusion over Nessie's insistence on treating Jack as if he were Chase disappeared when he heard that. "Oh gosh! We have to do something! To the Geckomobile! Arriba! Arriba! Away!"
Nessie watched him go, and then followed him with Jack in tow.
"Welcome, brave champions!" called the talkative Elder when Dojo and Nessie arrived. The dragons had been assembled once again around the Green Rock. "And I see you bring to us…a pasty-faced human child?"
"I'm not pasty-faced!" Jack complained.
"No!" Nessie retorted. "I bring to you The Enemy who defeated Tiamat but failed to elude me!"
"Oh, come on, guys!" Dojo snapped. "Uncle Tiamat's still on the Mountain of Everywhere! You have to come with me now!"
The Elders turned and fixed their glares on Dojo. "Silence, Kanojo Cho. We focus only on the first matter brought to our attention. It is tradition!" They went back to Nessie. "This does not look like The Enemy at all, Friend from the Loch. What is the meaning of this?"
Nessie glanced back at the cage. What were they talking about? He looks exactly as… It was then that she noticed the nexus of enchantment over her prisoner's chest. Of course! She thought. That brooch he's wearing…it's an illusion that only Tiamat and I could see. She unraveled the illusion, revealing to her own eyes what everyone else had been seeing all along.
"Mistakes were made…" Jack murmured. "But that's still no reason for you guys to eat me, right? Right? Right?"
"Be SILENT!" The talkative Elder snapped. "Friend from the Loch, it appears that you have made a mistake. Our window of opportunity is quickly elapsing, and your folly has forced us to go another tack."
The Elder surveyed the amassed dragon clans. "We have only a short time before the Dragoncircle Ceremony will have run out of time! The Enemy is still encroachin
g, and our only chance is to do what I had hoped that we would never have to do – make war on him directly!"
The dragons discussed amongst themselves in hushed tones. Koryu was dead-set against it. No way was all of her family going to get into a brawl with some cannibal. "There are people who take care of these things!" She said.
"No!" Jahmin Draco. "We must take the fight to him now. His forces are too strong to defeat if he gets the surprise advantage!"
The arguing grew more and more intense, and the Elders did nothing except egg them on. Nessie, too ashamed to do anything, had opted to just curl up next to her cage and sleep. Dojo had developed a headache worse than anything he had ever felt. All of the cumulative events of the past two days crashed down upon him. Jack Spicer and his Lily-bots, the Terrarcanum and the Lunarcanum, the Summoning, the attack on Tiamat…everything was beginning to take its toll.
But he still could have held it together, kept himself sane with a quip or two, if it weren't for the Shen Gong Wu that had chosen to callously reveal itself just then.
"GAH!" He howled, looking around in confusion as his body convulsed in the air. "I think I'm…I think I'm sensing a new Shen Gong Wu!"
"What?" Jack called from inside the cage. "Where is it?"
"Right here!" A familiar voice cackled. Every dragon on the rock turned to see Chase Young, in full combat gear…standing on the back of Great Uncle Tiamat.