About an hour after her conversation with Lucile, Ferris found herself standing outside a large gate, the kind that usually surrounded fancy gardens. However, this gate could hardly be considered fancy, with its cracked, moss covered boards. Ferris looked up at the sign. "MaD HErO," it read, the letters old and fading. Directly beneath that, another sign: "PLEaSe knoCK."
Lucile had said his friends were mad. With a nervous sigh, Ferris raised her hand and tapped lightly on the rotting wood. The boards creaked, and she lowered her fist for fear of breaking through. "Coming!" a voice called from the other side.
A lock clicked and a… something… peered out. "Yes?" it asked.
"You see," began Ferris nervously, "I heard you know my brother…"
"Are you selling something?" asked the thing.
"No."
"We don't need our driveway paved right now."
"I'm not a driveway salesperson…"
"We don't even have a driveway, actually."
"But I'm not selling anything!"
"You're not?"
"No."
"Are you a campaigning politician?"
"Nope."
"Girl Scout?"
"Wrong again."
"Jehovah's Witness?"
"No. Like I said, my brother sent me."
"Why didn't you say so? Come on in!"
The thing closed the door, undid the chain lock, and then swung the door open all the way. Ferris looked in at the garden, which was just about as well-kept as the front gate. Bushes and vines grew out of control, and the remains of a brick house lay in a pile off to one corner. In the centre stood a large table, matching the gate with all its moss and mould and termites, surrounded by six chairs, only one of which was currently occupied. The thing that opened the door turned to the thing sitting at the table.
"Look, dearest Demon, we have a guest!"
"A guest! I'm so glad, dearest Hero. I was feeling lonely…"
The Hero looked at the Demon. The Demon looked at the Hero.
"But I was even lonelier before my Hero found me" said the Demon with sparkling eyes.
The Hero pulled out a chair for Ferris and she sat down gratefully after her long walk. She felt far less grateful after the first of many bugs crawled out of the wood and across her leg. She accepted the teacup that the Hero offered her. It was chipped, but it looked clean enough. Despite her awkwardness, Ferris couldn't resist asking the most crucial of questions: "Um, excuse me Mister Hero, but do you have any dango to go with the tea?"
"Dango!" said the Hero.
"Dango!" said the Demon. "Of course there is no dango! Haven't you heard?"
Ferris was confused. Back home, dango and tea was a fairly standard combination for snack time. Up until now, it seemed to be the same in this world, too. "What happened to the dango?" she asked.
"Well," began the Demon, "It happened earlier this afternoon. We were enjoying tea and dango, when suddenly I thought, 'hey, does anybody here actually know how to make dango? I forget how'. My friend Hero forgot too. So we asked a nearby restaurant, only to discover that their recipe card for dango had mysteriously gone missing, and the chef had forgotten what ingredients to use to make more."
"It seems," continued the Hero, "that everybody forgot how to make dango at the exact same time. The only dango left is what was already made before this afternoon."
"Maybe something is wrong with the Dango God…" suspected Ferris.
"What's worse," said the Demon, "the king has been sending his soldiers around to collect all the remaining dango in the world. Rumour has it, he's keeping it all for himself."
Ferris stood up and slammed her hands on the table hard enough to make the old wood creak. "That king! A traitor to dango everywhere!" she shouted. She had to do something to rescue all that dango from the evil tyrant. The more she thought, the more it made sense. Why else would she have been sent to this world? Obviously she was meant to be the beautiful heroine, destined to return the precious dango to the oppressed population. Lucile had obviously sent her here knowing she would uncover her true mission while talking with the Hero and the Demon. That scary brother of hers was always helping her out.
Ferris' train of thought was suddenly interrupted by a crash. The boards of the fence on the far side of the garden snapped, and in charged Ryner. "Wait for me!" Ferris called after him as he ran across the garden. "No time for that," answered Ryner, "I have to get to the castle!" Ryner tried to run off, but the Hero was faster. It grabbed Ryner around the ears and pulled him back to the table.
"You can't leave yet," said the Demon, "You just got here. We were so lonely before you got here."
"Yeah," said the Hero, "besides, you have to pay for the repairs to our fence."
"Pay?" said Ryner, "but I spent all my money on dango earlier this morning!"
The Hero didn't look impressed. It stared at Ryner for a long time, clearly deep in thought and trying to come up with some other way for Ryner to pay his debt. Finally the Hero opened its mouth: "Let's eat him."
"Eat me?" said Ryner with a worried look on his face, "I don't have time to be eaten! I have to get to the castle! Besides, I wouldn't taste very good. I'm lazy, so there's a lot of fat on me, and I haven't showered in a few days so I probably smell bad, and, and…"
"And," Ferris interrupted, "Ryner is going to the castle to help me free the dango from the clutches of the evil king." Ferris finally understood Ryner's recent behaviour. Obviously he was acting weird because he knew what Sion was up to. There must have been something in that secret letter, some sort of dango collection command, that Ryner had chosen to ignore. Now, Ryner was racing to the castle with no time to waste before Sion ate the last of the dango in the world. Ferris felt happy. Her best friend hadn't abandoned her; he had simply decided that dango was more important than she was. Dango was more important than anything.
"If that's the case," said the Hero, "we will let him go."
"But," the Demon jumped in, looking at Ferris, "you have to stay for a little while longer. So we don't get lonely."
Ryner immediately jumped over the other side of the fence, toward the castle. Ferris stared in his direction, wishing she could follow. "We'll let you go soon," promised the Hero. The Demon shouted excitedly, "we'll let you go after you sing for us!"
"Sing?" asked Ferris, "But I don't know any songs!"
"Surely you must know some songs," insisted the Demon.
"I know the ABC song," Ferris said after some thought. The Hero and Demon looked confused. Did they not know the ABCs?
"You know, the ABCs. Like the Alphabe…" Ferris was cut off by frantic shouting.
"ALPHA?" screamed the Hero.
"ALPHA?" shouted the Demon.
"ALPHA!?" came a booming voice from inside the teapot. "ALPHA ALPHA ALPHA AHAHAHAHAHA," it laughed. Red light emerged from the spout. The top popped off, releasing more red. Ferris thought the whole world would turn red. Out of the teapot and the red light crawled a creature even uglier than the Hero and the Demon. "AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA," it laughed some more.
"Now you've done it! You've awoken Alpha!" the Demon yelled at Ferris. The Hero lunged at the teapot and fought to get the lid back on. "AHAHAHA," Alpha continued to laugh as the world got more and more red. Ferris and the Demon ran over to help the Hero. Together they pushed down on the lid until it was firmly attached to the pot. However, the laughing and red did not stop.
"In here! Put it in here!" the Demon commanded, madly pointing to its eye. The Hero picked up the teapot, still holding the lid down, and poured Alpha and all its laughter and its red light straight out the spout and into the Demon's eye. The laughter stopped. The red stopped.
Ferris, after a quick look over her shoulder to make sure those two no longer needed her help, took advantage of the chaos and made her escape out the old garden gate and back into the forest.