Chapter 58: The Sleepover to End All Sleepovers

Aw, yeah! Tomorrow, first thing in the morning, the King is finally going to share with us what he found in the royal archives about the music box…

…which means, tonight, we're all sleeping over in the castle. And you know what that means… EPIC CASTLE SLUMBER PARTY! We gonna crank it up tonight, it's gonna be off the CHIZZY, yo!

…sorry. I think my journal actually cringed. I promise I will never, ever do that again.

Anyway…

Tonight, I swear, on my honor, that we four shall abide by the Sacred Rules of the Sleepover which are as follows:

PAJAMAS, JUNK FOOD AND GOSSIP GALORE
PILLOWFIGHTS, MOVIES AND TEARING UP THE DANCE FLOOR
AND LISTEN UP, 'CAUSE THIS I WON'T REPEAT
NEVER, EVER GO TO SLEEP!

By this oath swear we all; all those who break it shall hereforth be inscribed in the Book of Losers for all eternity. Shame be unto all who suffer such a fate.

Sasha wrote those words at the start of our first official sleepover… of course she spelled a lot of them wrong. We were like five. NGL, it's… its gonna be weird doing this without her. It… kinda feels like we've always been following her lead, even when it comes to stuff like this. But hey… it's not like we need her to have fun or anything. We're in a castle! Imagine the shenanigans we can get up to in a castle!

Well, shenanigans were gotten up to. We did just about everything. Ran wild through the halls, raided the royal kitchen (I swear Polly ate an entire triple-tier cake), vandalized a royal portrait or three, assaulted Lady Olivia with silly-silk-worms, maybe committed a few mild felonies… you know, classic sleepover! Surely, we've had enough fun to last an entire night. Right?

IT'S ONLY 9PM?

How is that possible? We're all totally exhausted. 9:00 is when parents get tired. Is that what this is? Are we getting too old for sleepovers?

No. No, we can't let this happen. First, you're too tired to stay up all night, next thing you know, it's al the other horrors of adulthood. Taxes and mortgages and *shudder* colonoscopies.

We must no go gently into that good night! We must rage, rage against the dying of the l- okay, that doesn't work It's night already. But the sentiment's clear, right? I'm taking a stand! A stand against encroaching adulthood! We are going to save this sleepover!

It's time. I'm breaking out… the Scare-Dare Challenge. We four, we happy four, will march into the abyss of fear and emerge on the other side, or suffer the shame of being inscribed in the Book of Losers.

Well, we did it. We stayed awake all night!

In fact, we may never sleep again.

Let's back up, earlier, during the shenanigan portion of our night, Lady Olivia warned us hat the castle basement was strictly off limits. Well, telling kids not to do something is basically telling kids to definitely do something, so, when it came time to come up with a Scare Dare Challenge, there was naturally only one choice; we were going to sneak into the castle basement.

Lucky (or unlucky, considering we were about to do the kind of thing you yell at horror movie characters for doing) for us, Olivia was sound asleep (I have a feeling she wasn't exactly drinking "juice", if you know what I mean), so we were easily able to get past her to the basement stairs.

Talk about spooky! It was exactly the kid of place where four groovy teens and their talking dog would get chased by some old guy in a ghost costume.

After a classic jumpscare, we found ourselves in a hall completely lined with mirrors. Funny how there were so many in a place where supposedly no one was supposed to be. At the end was a door with a prominent sign in Ancient Newtopian. Marcy was able to give it a rough translation, but the meaning was painfully obvious: "Hey, you. Stay out of here. This place is off limits. It is chock full of bad juju. Only a complete idiot, repeat, a complete idiot, would go in here."

…so, anyway, we went in there.

And what do you suppose we found in there? Well, if you said "creepy ol' crypt full of dead bodies", well, congratulations, you're today's winner! I'd say there were about half-a-dozen or so coffins (doesn't matter what world you're in, you know a coffin when you see one) floating in a pool of calf-deep bog water. Now, this is just me, but the last place I'd like to spend my eternal rest was floating in filthy water, but then I'm not an amphibian.

So, what do you do to top that? Well, next, we dared ourselves to take a selfie in front of a coffin. After all, at that point, we were already going to Frog Hell, so no point dialing back the sacrilege now, right?

I mean, who would know, right?

Well, we got the answer to that right away. These… things started appearing. Pastel-colored, semi-transparent floating blob-things with random numbers of eyes. If you saw a picture of one, you might think they were kind of cute, but let me tell you, you do NOT want to run into these things… especially since they start to dissolve anything that passes through them!

So, at this point, we finally did something smart… we ran like heck. The things chased after us, through this hallway full of mist and plants. Now, even a dumbass like me knows that plants need sunlight to grow, yet the vegetation in here was healthy, even thriving. How was this possible? I have no idea, but the strangest thing was this feeling off calm that washed over me. It felt… familiar somehow, like I'd encountered it once before, but I just couldn't put my finger on it. Not calm enough to not be scared out of my wits, mind you. There was also this ripped-up painting there for some reason, but it's probably not important.

Well, you'll never guess where the passage came out… Marcy's room! She had a secret passage to the spooky basement right under her feet the whole time, and she didn't even realize it! Not that it mattered, because the ghost-blob-things were still after us. We threw everything we could at them, but nothing seemed to have any effect until Sprig accidentally held a mirror up to one of them. It turns out mirrors turn these things solid, and vulnerable to a good ol' pillowbashing.

So, yeah. We drove them off, but that just left us with a million questions. Like… were those ghosts? And if they were… ghosts of what? Cause they sure don't look like anything I've ever seen. And what killed them? Could it come for us? Were there any other horrible multi-eyed abominations lurking around down there? Frog, I hope not.

So, yeah. What a night. I just hope the nightmares'll be worth it.

A.N.: So, I got my hands on Marcy's Journal! Expect me to start updating Find a Way to Star Again more regularly once I finish (I've already gone back and made a few edits like fixing Terri's pronouns and editing the section where they talk about Marcy's webcomic).

Ashley: Thanks, and same! Nah, for Christmas you get this totally-unrelated-to Christmas chapter.

Jose: Thanks!

Next: A Day at the Aquarium