It was a late Wednesday night in Florida, or rather, a very early Thursday morning. Either way, Wayne's parents were both asleep, and his younger sister, Peggy, likely followed suit.
The aforementioned boy, a dirty-blonde haired teenager in a faded yellow coat with gray circles under his eyes, grabbed his knapsack that he carefully packed the day before and slowly pulled open his bedroom door, cringing at the loud creak of its hinges that would ordinarily seem muted during the day.
This would be the third night he snuck out to the thicket this week, and he was going prepared this time.
He quietly stepped through the kitchen and opened the backdoor, painfully aware of his parents sleeping just on the other side of the house's thin walls. He exited onto an elevated porch and dashed to the forested area about a hundred feet behind the secluded house, with his knapsack hanging by his side.
There was a faint sprinkle of rain, but that's actually a preferable circumstance for tonight.
After entering the muddy thicket, he eventually came to a clearing among the trees and overgrown flora. The chirping of crickets filled the night, accompanied by the sound of an occasional rain drop passing through the canopy of trees.
He took a candy bar, one of many items he had packed for the adventure, out of his knapsack, tore the wrapping from it, and started absentmindedly gnawing on it as he walked around the clearing, not in a hurry, but to shift his perspective as he observed the surrounding plants.
He was looking for that frog. Every night that he came out to the thicket, he'd seen a colorful frog hopping along the tree roots and mushroom caps. It wasn't colorful in the way that most other frogs were colorful, though; this frog seemed to glow with a bright, yellow light, as if it were constantly being reflected off of its golden skin.
Wayne knew it wouldn't take long for the frog to appear, although there was always the thought in the back of his mind that he was simply just imagining it. People did always tell him he had an overactive imagination.
No, it was real, and it wasn't a trick of the moonlight. He knew this for a fact.
But he had come out here not just to admire the frog; this time he would try to catch it. He didn't like the idea, but he was sure that he had discovered some new species of glowing frog or something, and he wanted to catch it as proof.
Suddenly, Wayne saw a familiar yellow glow hopping just past the clearing. He quickly put the unfinished candy bar in his coat pocket and took out a small jar barely big enough to contain the frog, a few holes haphazardly punched in its lid.
With a shaky stride, he crept towards the glowing amphibian. He had a sudden thought about it potentially being poisonous, but hastily wrote it off as an irrational fear. He'd come this far.
He was so close. Just a few more steps.
He lunged for the frog, but when he got close, it emitted a bright flash of light that made him flinch away, and it deftly hopped out of his reach, deep into the moist thicket before he could grab it.
"Wait!" he called after it, rubbing his eyes as he broke into a run to try and catch up with the frog before he lost sight of it. He later ditched the jar into his knapsack, opting to simply use his bare hands.
Unfortunately, he clumsily tripped on the root of a tree and landed facedown in the mud. He wiped the mud off his face and looked around for the frog, but his attention quickly shifted to observe the now exaggerated landscape around him. This part of the thicket was certainly different than anywhere else he'd been, Wayne thought. The plants were huge, and some of the mushrooms were bigger than his head. He didn't see the golden frog, however.
Giving up, Wayne set off back in the direction he had come from, but he quickly found that he had no idea what part of the thicket he was in, and that he was hopelessly lost. As he started to panic, he caught sight of something that made the glowing frog seem like the most ordinary thing in the world: an enormous, ten-foot tall praying mantis, its head turning to meet the source of the sudden gasp (or shriek?) that could serve as its next potential meal.
The monster let out a gurgled hiss that finally broke Wayne's paralyzing fear and caused him to switch to active terror. As he doubled over in disbelief, horror, and some third emotion he couldn't name, Wayne bolted in the other direction so fast that, as soon as he got any momentum, he tripped over himself, falling to the ground in a heap and hitting his head on a heavy rock.
On the verge of passing out, though, Wayne heard the triumphant shout of what sounded like a rambling old man: "THAT'LL TEACH YE TO MESS WITH OL' GEL TOBADO YE DISGUSTIN', BUG-EYED-" but Wayne slipped from consciousness before he heard the end of the taunting shouts.
~X~
Los Angeles, 16 hours later.
The thrift store was relatively empty, aside from one gentleman picking out a shirt and the store clerk, an elderly woman, napping on one elbow at the check-out counter.
Anne was looking up at the strange music box her friends had pointed out to her, trying to build up the courage to do what she very well knew she shouldn't.
It was a chest-like box with a crank on one side of it, and the depiction of a golden frog seeming to worship three colored gems arranged in a circle on its lid, though there seemed to be a slot for a smaller, fourth gem in the center of the other three, which was empty.
"Alright Anne, you can do this." she said to herself with a bit of resolve, and she glanced back at the store clerk before grabbing the exotic music box and stuffing it in her backpack.
One of her friends, Sasha, who was watching the whole thing through the store's display glass with Marcy, gave her an encouraging double thumbs-up. Her friend's encouragement did little to ease her guilt though, and she quickly stepped out of the thrift store with hunched shoulders.
~X~
Wayne shifted slowly as he started to wake, not sitting up immediately due to an unusual headache. He rose with a jolt, though, when he realized he was moving.
The jerking motion sent a sharp pain through his forehead, though, and he bent down low, groaning audibly. He opened his eyes and saw that he had been resting in a small, open cart, which was being pulled by a steadily moving. . . snail?
He was completely and utterly dumbfounded. He searched for an answer in his memory, and he remembered last night's events clearly now. The frog, the mantis, and the strange voice he heard before he blacked out.
Had he been shrunken down to a size that made snails and mantises seem gargantuan? Was there a race of little people that hitched wagons to snails as if they were horses? With the little amount of information he had to go off of at the moment, that seemed like the most plausible theory to Wayne, even if it might still sound ludicrous to most people.
Before he could think about it any more, though, he heard a calm, rustic voice call to him from ahead, presumably riding the snail: "Easy there, Mango! You awake back there, creature?"
Wayne found his balance and stood up in the small cart to try and get a better look at the suddenly present speaker, but when he saw the purple-skinned, bipedal creature resembling an axolotl that was looking over its shoulder at him with an amused smile, he considered flinging himself from the small cart.
The axolotl seemed to notice this and spoke before Wayne could act. "What're ye frightened o' me fer, creature? I ain't a ghost yet after all!" and he chuckled hardily, which put Wayne at ease enough to finally talk.
"There was an, umm- a monster." he said, as if he didn't consider the thing before him to be one as well.
"The mantis?" Gel asked, "Hah! Shoulda seen the nasty critter skamperin' about when I hit 'em square on the nose with one o' these!" and he held up a bottle full of a deep-orange, pulsating liquid.
"My own creation; mind you, I adapted the formula from my great aunt Amby's scarab ointment. Of course, both recipes use the same- AH! Sorry, rambling like an old toad; horrible habit from a life of seclusion. You got a name, boy?"
Wayne's perception of the axolotl changed a bit with that sentence. Maybe he wasn't as horrible as he looked.
"I'm Wayne." he said with the hint of a smile on his face.
"A probable pleasure it is to meet you, Wayne. My name's Gel Tobado," Gel bowed his head a bit and looked back to the path ahead of them before speaking again. "You from around here, creature?"
Wayne didn't exactly know the answer to the question himself.
He looked around at the beautiful landscape around him, and it looked nothing like the Florida marshes he was used to. There were giant, glowing mushrooms of various hues, and cattails bigger than his arm hanging over murky ponds. But the largest indicator that he'd been sent to another world was the blood-red moon that illuminated the beautiful valley.
"I don't think so," he managed. "I'm not entirely sure where I am."
Gel thought about this for a moment, and then he looked to Wayne with a proposition in mind. "Well if you'd care to keep an old salamander company, I suppose you could stay with me fer a bit, just until ye find yer way. I've got a few extra cots layin' around, and it gets unbearably lonely out in the valley."
Wayne considered his offer for a bit, and quickly determined he didn't have much of a choice. "I'd like that. Thanks a ton." he said to the axolotl.
Gel nodded. "We ain't too far from me lodgings, now; should be there in an hour or so." Gel turned back to the path ahead and leaned forward with squinted eyes, as if to estimate the distance by sight.
Wayne nodded and lay back down in the cramped cart, trying his best to get comfortable for the journey. He noticed his knapsack sitting in the corner of the cart and, silently thanking the axolotl for grabbing it, pulled apart its drawstrings and took stock of his belongings. There was a jar, a few candy bars, and an old flip phone that his mom made him take anytime he left the house.
He opened the phone and dialed his mom's number, but wasn't the least bit surprised when he didn't find a signal. He deposited his belongings back in the knapsack and put his hands in his coat pocket, feeling the unfinished candy bar from earlier that night.
Strangely, though, he also felt a hard, pointed object akin to a rock. He pulled out the enigmatic object and saw that it wasn't a rock, but a perfectly cut gemstone, like a diamond. It's most peculiar quality, however, was that it was a ghostly gray in color.
He once again looked out onto the beautiful valley and contemplated the absurdity of his situation. He must be in another world, he thought. Somehow, that glowing frog had sent him to this strange land. Maybe it was a punishment for disturbing it, or maybe that's just the fate that any creature coming too close to its light meets.
His thoughts soon drifted to his home, and how he might possibly get back to it. Most of all, though, he thought about his parents and his sister.
"I'll find a way back," Wayne whispered too quietly for anyone but himself to hear. "no matter what."
~X~
Florida, a day and a night earlier.
"I'm telling you, I saw it as clear as day! It had golden skin and glowed like a lightbulb!"
Wayne was walking home from school with Peggy. Their parents were keen on making sure he kept a close eye on his little sister.
"You think that just because I'm younger than you, I'll believe anything you tell me! You don't even have any proof!"
Wayne was hardly even listening to her. He'd heard nearly the same rebuttal from her ten times already.
"I'm just telling you what I saw." he proclaimed, throwing his arms up in frustration for what felt like the twentieth time since they started walking.
Peggy narrowed her eyes at him, reconsidering his claim in light of his obvious sincerity. "Well, if you seem so sure, why not just catch the frog and show it to me?" she asked.
Wayne stared at her, searching for an answer to the simple question. "That just feels. . wrong."
"Wrong?"
"I mean, a creature like that is meant to be observed. It would feel wrong to disturb it."
Peggy rolled her eyes. "You're such a dandy! You're just making up excuses for why you don't have any proof!"
Wayne stared at the ground in contemplation for a moment as they arrived to the dirt path that would lead them home. "Well if that's the only thing that'll get you to believe me," he said with mounting resolve, "then- then maybe I will catch it!"
"Sure you will." Peggy sneered back.
They walked through the front door, kicked off their shoes, and went to their respective rooms. Wayne immediately started preparing for a frog hunt.
Hello there! This is my very first story on any fanfiction website ever. I hope you enjoyed the first chapter to what is going to be my main project for at least a year. If you have any questions or criticisms, I would absolutely like to hear them.