Chapter 3: The New Normal part 2

Dear Ivy,

Well, it finally happened. Anne managed to convince her parents to let us out of the house!

Okay, it was just going to be a trip to the market… under heavy supervision… in disguise… but it was still a chance to get to experience this bold new world!

Anne made the three of us human disguises. Technically, it's two disguises, since Polly and I were sharing.

[doodle of Hop-Pop, Sprig, and Polly's disguises]

Check it out! Just a couple of regular humans out human-ing it up! You can hardly even tell we're frogs. Hop-Pop even has a face bump!

We all piled into the Boonchuys' metal bug, which has surprisingly comfortable innards. I asked Mr. Boonchuy what metal bugs eat, and he said "at today's gas prices, mostly my savings." I'm not sure what that meant. Anne said it was a dad joke. I don't really remember anything about having a dad, but I guess these "dad jokes" are part of the package?

[drawing of the exterior of 99 Ranchers]

Here's the market the Boonchuys brought us too. It's called 99 Ranchers, which is weird because I didn't see even one rancher, let alone 99 of them.

Inside, the place is so big you could probably fit about a dozen of the Grub n' Go in there. There are sections for fruits and vegetables, grain, beast meat, seafood, grains, and snacks. And those are just the things I recognize. Like, when we visited the vegetable department, there were things that looked just like stuff we have at home, only smaller (and a lot more harmless; the tomatoes don't bite, the avocados aren't poisonous, and the almonds can't hypnotize you) but also things that I didn't recognize at all, like these long yellow things called "bandanas" and this huge spiny thing that I thought was a fruit but it turned out to be a stink bomb of some kind. I only got a whiff, but Hop Pop got a whole face full of it. And Anne told me some humans actually eat these things. And she used to say our food was gross!

Sounds pretty dull, so far, doesn't it? I mean by comparison to back home. No giant monsters, crabs small enough to make friends with (not that I got to). Not nearly up to our usual standard of disaster.

Well, that was about to change.

Anne had taken us to a lunch counter within the market to introduce us to a local delicacy called "noodles." They're like worms, except they don't try to escape and they go down really easy, And they come in this broth that has so many complex underlying flavors that I can't even begin to describe them.

So, there we were, just having lunch and trying to live our bet lives, when all of a sudden, for just the briefest second, I saw it.

It was one of Andrias's Frobos, but it was able to make itself invisible somehow. I just barely saw it out of the corner of my eye before it turned itself invisible again. I tried to warn Anne, but well… you know the story of The Pollywog who Cried Heron? I'd been bugging her a lot asking whether things were robots (it turns out very few things are) and she'd sorta started tuning me out at the point, so it was a big surprise when the Frobo grabbed her by the neck and started choking her. I threw the first thing I could find at it, my bowl of noodles (fair thee well, my lunch, for it was never to be). And I guess that was the right thing to do, because besides being delicious, it turns out noodles have a property that disrupts invisibility cloak spells (hmmm… maybe call it Cloak-Bot?)!

[drawing of Cloak-Bot]

Too bad it only worked once, because when Hop Pop tried, the Cloak-Bot simply caught it. I guess that it can learn? Makes sense, our Frobo was able to learn too.

We ran for it, being careful to not let Anne's mom and dad find out about what was happening. Make sense, they'd probably be a lot less willing to keep us around if they knew an evil king was trying to kill us. Anne was able to set up some sort of annoying noise field that she said would definitely distract them and cover the noise of the fight. After that, Anne hit the Cloak-Bot with a sack of flour so we could see it, but seeing it and fighting it were two different things, This Frobo was as strong as the ones back at the castle, but a lot faster and more agile. Anne said it's like the Law of Ninjas… fight a lot and the go down like dominos, but fight one and it's unstoppable. I guess that would make more sense if I knew what a ninja was.

It would have been a lot easier if Anne knew how to use her magic blue powers (remember those from two letters ago?) but she has no idea how to make them work. I've seen her trying to activate them sometimes. She just sort of squats down and starts yelling with her eyes closed, but nothing ever happens. She said it works for Annie May, who I'm guessing is some great human warrior. Clearly, my destiny is to seek her out and train at her feet. Another reason why it's important we leave the house!

The only real thing we had working for us was that for some reason, Cloak-Bot really doesn't want to be seen, so whenever a human passed by it would withdraw from the fight, which gave us a chance to put some distance between us. She led us to this room full of hanging beast meat to hide, but it was super-cold in there and we froze solid almost immediately (though it wasn't like Hiber-Day cold because we were still sort of awake in there. We couldn't move, but we could see everything. So there wasn't much we could do when Cloak-Bot showed up in the Cold Room. Best we could do was try to distract it, which… didn't go well. All we were able to do was kind of lightly slide into him, and all that did was make him target us with his blaster ray thing. And that's when I finally got to see Anne use her powers!

It wasn't exactly how Polly and Hop Pop described it. They said her hair turned blue and she grew weird wooden horns and started glowing really bright, but the only difference I saw was a slight blur glow in her eyes. But you could definitely see something was going on, because she was able to smash the Cloak-Bot's head in with just one punch! I guess that was more than it could take, because it smashed through the wall and ran away, and that was the last we saw of it all night.

Anne was able to push us out of the Cold Room after that. Once we were able to thaw, I tried to get Anne to show off her powers some more but she passed out. I think using her powers drains her or something. She said later that using them made her "feel bad". So maybe it's not something that all humans can do. Maybe it's a power that humans aren't meant to have and using it hurts her. In that case, I really hope she doesn't have to use it ever again.

We were able to wake Anne up with one of those stinkbomb fruits I mentioned, and after that we hooked back up with Anne's parents after Anne made sure to pick up all the groceries we were supposed to get. The rest of the night was much more peaceful; we managed to talk Anne's mom into making noodles again for dinner, and then we all played a board game where you try to take over real estate (Polly won). The good news is that the Boonchuys never found out about the Cloak-Bot, so, true to their word, they're going to let Anne take us outside more! I think I'm gonna want my own disguise from now on, though. Having Polly for feet was way too awkward.

(After all this went down, I still was kind of hung up about the whole "cold room". Polly thinks it's just using the same magic (or like she calls it, "technology") that makes the cold box in Anne's house work, but applied to a whole room. Hop Pop asked if she knew a way to make it work back home, since food keeps a lot longer in the cold. She says once you figure out how one thing works, you could apply it to all sorts of different things. I think she's picking up how things work in this world a lot faster than we are, which is pretty impressive... and also a little scary.)

Anyway, that's it for now, more letters to come!

Exhaustedly yours,

Sprig

A.N.: Sorry this has been slow going. Surprisingly it's a lot harder to put myself in the headspace of a frog from a medieval-themed world thrust into our own.

Jose: Thanks, I try.

Next: Hop 'til You Drop