Chapter 4:

To Create a Cure

Inside of Maddie Flour's bedroom, located on the second floor of the Flour family's house/bakery simply called 'Flour and Daughters Bakery', the witch frog was sitting at her desk with her spell book opened in front of her, as well as a few other assorted books placed near the corner.

Since her return home with the human Sprig and Anne at her side, she had spent about an hour searching through her spell book, flipping through its pages, jotting down notes, switching to the other books for supplementary materials, rinse and repeat.

Meanwhile, Sprig and Anne were sitting on the blue frog's bed, watching her doing her research through the tools that she had at her disposal. The orange-haired frog-turned-human was wearing a spare set of clothes that his best friend had given to him in her haste: A black hoodie and a pair of dark brown shorts with a violet waistband. He was also wearing a cloak that served to mostly hide his human features from the public eye.

The two humans briefly glanced at each other, as if they were telekinetically asking each other if Maddie is doing alright and if their presence are actually needed, since it already had been while that she started doing it without them having to do anything yet.

Some more time had passed and Maddie seemed to have stopped her search through her books, as she let out a tired sigh, closed her eyes and rubbed her temples with her fingers.

"Um… Everything okay over there, Maddie?" Anne asked, wondering if the older Flour child somehow found an answer to her best friend's problems.

"Sort of." Maddie replied as she turned towards the two humans sitting on her bed.

"Please tell me that you found something that can fix this." Sprig pleaded.

"I might have a rough idea." Maddie said as she got off her chair and stood in front of Sprig and Anne. "But before I get to that, I think I owe you an explanation, since I'm part of the reason that Sprig has been transformed in the first place."

"You're talking about your potions, right?"

The witch frog nodded. "In case that you were wondering, the potions that I carried with me last night were very complex concoctions containing ingredients that are hard to find here in the valley." she explained as she went to grab her book from the desk and started to flip through the pages to find a visual example of what she was talking about. "These potions don't do anything by themselves, but they are core ingredients for a recipe to create a single, most potent potion capable of healing major injuries, such as scars and bone fractures."

Maddie found the page that she was looking for and showed it to the two humans. The page contained a picture of the potion in question, as well as the various steps required to create it, including the materials involved. "Completing this recipe means that I can proceed to the next level as a witch, if not for the fact that a certain someone made me spill all of the potions on him without looking."

"Sorry, Maddie…" Sprig sheepishly apologized once more.

"So all those potions that you used… It was to make a healing potion?" Anne asked for clarification.

Maddie nodded.

"So if it's just that, then how come all those potions mixed together changed Sprig's body instead?"

"Because the recipe asks that we follow a very strict, step-by-step procedure." Maddie explained, as she pointed with her finger the set of instructions written on the book. "Mixing the potions all at once without proper care often leads to disastrous results. The most common result is that the person will change into a hideous monstrosity that is often an amalgamation of the various creatures and natural flora that exist here in Amphibia, as well as some that is alien to us."

"You mean I could have turned out to be even more hideous than I am now?!" The freaked-out boy asked.

"Yep. Except this time, it's not the case. Instead of becoming an abomination, you transformed into a human, the same as Anne." she said, as she closed the spell book. "And I'm still racking my brain as to how that's even possible."

"Yeah, that is weird, after everything you just said." Anne commented as she looked over Sprig's human body. "I mean, why a human, of all things? He could just have been turned into something else, like a mantis or a grubhog or something."

Sprig shivered at the thought of being turned into a wild creature of the woods. "Yeesh… I dunno if I consider myself lucky or not for being transformed into a human instead of anything else…"

"Sprig," Maddie spoke. "When you fled after our accident yesterday, did you do something to yourself?"

"Um… Not really." He replied. "I just ran straight back home, that's all. Oh, but I did took a bath to wash off the potion, if that counts."

"Hmm… Anything else that happened in between?"

"Well… I did ran into Anne near the farm." Sprig turned his head towards Anne, crossing his gaze with hers. "But that's about it, really. I can't see anything else that could be a factor."

Anne thought about her conversation with Sprig last night, trying to figure out if there really isn't anything that could explain his sudden change. Then, she let out a gasp when something from her interaction with him crossed her mind. "Wait a minute! Sprig, I think me hugging you might have changed the effect of the potions!"

"Huh? Really?" Sprig considered what she said, then realization hit him, as if everything seemed to align that would explain the leadup to his situation. "Oh yeah! I think you might be right, Anne!"

"Hold on. You believe Anne hugging you is what caused the disastrous recipe to change?" Maddie asked.

"I mean, how else can we explain it? All I did was running away until I met up with Anne before I went back home. Nothing else besides that."

Maddie lowered her gaze and began to tap her chin with her finger in rhythm, as she processed what the two humans told her. "Hmm… This is interesting…"

After much consideration, she raised her head up and walked up to Anne, letting her eyes study the native human girl's body intently.

Anne knew what the witch frog was doing, but it didn't make her feel any less uncomfortable as a result.

Maddie then grabbed hold of Anne's head, turned it around to one side for one moment, then shifted it to the other side. Next, she picked up one of her arms that were resting next to her on the bed and leaned her face closer, as she analyzed each inch of the skin, down to the pores. Finally, after letting go of her arm, Maddie quickly plucked some of Anne's brown hair.

"Ow! A little bit of warning next time?" Anne complained as she rubbed the part of her head that had its hair plucked.

"Sorry. I need a sample from you that might help me with finding a cure for Sprig." Maddie explained her rough action.

"Fine. So… Got anything after treating me like an ant under a magnifying glass?"

"Well… It's interesting." The blue frog said. "After comparing your body to Sprig's, besides some obvious differences, his body type seems to be identical to yours. Maybe his age has changed as well, to be the same as yours."

"So… You're saying that I'm currently older than 10?" Sprig asked, as he looked down his own human body.

"Wait, you were 10 years old?" Anne asked, surprised to hear her best friend's age when he was his regular old frog self.

"Yeah. I didn't tell you that before?"

Anne shrugged. "A first for me. Which reminds me, you gotta tell me when's your birthday, dude."

"It's just an assumption, but that's what I got based on my observation." Maddie said. She then turned her attention towards the Thai-American girl. "Were you carrying anything when you interacted with Sprig last night?"

"Not really. Just the clothes on my back, is all." Anne replied. "Oh, but I also had a picture with me, but I don't think that has anything to do with it."

"Hm… This isn't enough for me to go on. I'll have to look more into this later."

Maddie considered every single piece of information that was given to her before she stated her case. "Well, in any case, I think the information that you've given me helped me understand a bit more on what we're dealing here."

"So does that mean that you can solve my problem now, Maddie?!" Sprig asked, hoping that his woes could be fixed instantly.

"Well, that depends, really." Maddie pulled out a pouch containing a powdered concoction. "Before I get to that, I want to try out one thing first."

"What's that?" Anne asked, pointing at the pouch in Maddie's hand.

"It's a magic powder typically used to dispel one's own magic. Since my potions are responsible for Sprig's transformation, technically, it's my magic that we're dealing with here."

"You think it's gonna work?" Sprig asked, still hopeful.

"Only one way to find out."

Without giving the boy time to prepare, Maddie threw the pouch at him, as it hit him straight in the face before exploding into colourful smoke that shrouded his entire body.

Sprig coughed as the smoke got in his lungs, while Anne, who was sitting next to him, coughed as well, fanning the smoke away from her face with her hand.

Once the smoke cleared and Sprig was able to see and breathe again, he quickly turned to Anne with eyes full of hope. "Well? Did it work, Anne?"

When her best friend asked her, Anne looked over his whole body to see if anything happened to him.

He was still a tall, light-skinned human.

"Nope. Sorry, dude." Anne shook her head.

Sprig looked down on his hands to see that they were still five-fingered human hands. He then let out a disappointed groan.

"Well, it's to be expected." Maddie said. "If a basic dispelling magic isn't enough to fix this, then this calls for a cure in a form of a complex spell."

"What do you need to do?" Anne asked.

"I'm still working on it. But based on what I've read so far from my spell book and all other supplementary books, to create a cure, I'll need to make a potion that is the complete opposite in nature from what it was used that turned Sprig into this. All the potions that were spilled on him? I'll have to create their dynamic opposites in order to make that one, crucial potion."

"So making that potion is going to be a piece of cake… Right?" Sprig asked, still having hope in his heart, but it was clear that the size of it was very small, as if the boy may already knew the answer to his own question.

Maddie sighed, as she had no choice but to dash the boy's hopes no matter how sad it may be. "Sprig, the potions that I had yesterday took about three months to make, due to how hard it is to find the core ingredients of each. Making their polar opposites would take even more time. And…" She turned her gaze away from the boy, unable to look at him in the eye as she dropped the news on him. "It may even be… impossible to make. Because as far as I know, those core ingredients might not even exist here."

With that, what remaining hope that the Plantar boy had within him had shattered. It was bad enough that the potions from the other day were hard to make, but to be told from an expect magic user like Maddie that making that exact cure for his human predicament would be virtually impossible…

He let himself fall back, as his back hit the mattress while the expression on his face was full of despair. "So… I'm stuck like this… forever…?" he slowly asked the question that he already knew the answer for.

"I'm sorry, Sprig…" Maddie sadly apologized. "I want to help you. I really do. But this is beyond what all of us can really do."

Anne frowned as she watched her best friend slip into despair after hearing the terrible news. This is the most that she saw him being incredibly depressed, and she didn't think that anything would top his reaction to Ivy turning him down. It hurt her to see the always-cheerful Sprig Plantar like that. She wanted to cheer him up somehow, but how can you cheer up someone who's faced the possibility that he is forced to become a completely different person? The only way to do so was to find the ingredients for the cure, but as Maddie said, it is likely impossible to find those ingredients here in the valley.

In the valley…

"Wait a minute…" Anne started to speak, as she might have found a possibility that could turn things around. "Maddie, you said that finding the ingredients would be impossible to find, right? Do you mean it's impossible to find here in the valley?"

"Well, yes, that's what I was saying." Maddie replied.

Sprig looked over at Anne with a look of confusion. "Anne, what are you getting at…?"

Anne turned to Sprig with a huge smile on her face. "What if we can find those ingredients outside of the valley? You know, out there in the world of Amphibia?"

Sprig's eyes started to light up as soon as Anne's words started to sink in, hope slowly returning in his heart. "Wait, you mean…?"

"What do you think, Maddie?" Anne asked as she turned her attention back at the witch frog. "It's not impossible to say that those seemingly impossible ingredients can be found somewhere else in the rest of the world, right?"

"Hmm…" Maddie contemplated the human girl's words and realized that her own knowledge was only limited to her home region. She had not consider putting the outside world into the equation. "I haven't been outside of the valley at all… So there is a chance that you might be right about this, Anne."

Anne turned back towards the orange-haired boy. "And Sprig, remind me. When do the mountains surrounding the valley start to clear up?"

Sprig sat up from the bed. "Um… In a few days, I think?"

"And what are we going to do in a few days?"

"To explore the outside world and help you find a way to get you back home?"

"Right. And what else?"

Sprig gasped. "And we can try and find the ingredients for the potions along the way at the same time!"

Anne snapped her fingers. "Now you're getting it!"

Once the idea was fully shared to everyone in the room, Anne and Sprig cheered, as they pumped their fists up to the ceiling. "Spranne against the world!"

"That's incredible, Anne!" Sprig exclaimed as he leaned forward and wrapped his best friend around in a huge hug. "Thank you!"

"Haha! Anytime, dude!" Anne grinned as she returned the hug.

Maddie could not resist smiling at a rather adorable display between the two humans. Although it was nice to see them full of hope, she felt that it was too early to celebrate.

"Now hold on." The witch frog said. "You said that the ingredients can be found outside of the valley, but you don't exactly have any proof that it's the case."

"Well, I could say the same thing to you about the ingredients not existing anywhere." Anne threw Maddie's statement back at her, as she pulled away from the hug.

"True. I admit, you got me convinced. I'm going to have to research what's beyond the valley to find some proof as to whether or not the ingredients that we're looking for exist. But how am I going to get access to that information?"

"Oh! You can always go to the town archives!" Sprig suggested. "They gotta have tons of boring stuff about the whole world in there!"

"Oh, the Historic Wartwood Town Archives. That's a good idea, Sprig."

"Uh, Sprig? The entrance to the archives is busted, remember?" Anne reminded Sprig. "And I'm pretty sure that it's still busted, since we still haven't told anyone about it."

"Oh right." The young boy said, as he remembered what occurred the last time they went to the archives. "I mean, she can still go through the pipes to get there."

"Do you really want to suggest her that?" Anne asked.

"No." Sprig shuddered, as the horrific memories of going through the toilet pipes came rushing back in.

"I'm sure I can get inside somehow." Maddie said. "The only thing that I'm going to worry about is finding the time to get there and search through archives in its entirety, but it shouldn't be a problem in the slightest."

"So you think you can manage it?" Anne asked the blue frog.

"It really depends if we find what we need. And even if we do, I still need time to research both a cure for Sprig and what the outside world has to offer. When do you think you guys will be coming back from your trip outside of the valley?"

"Umm… I think in a month or two?" Sprig replied with uncertainty.

"Well, if everything goes well and you manage to find the ingredients, I'll still need about a month worth of preparation to create the cure."

"Meaning… I'm stuck like this for a few months, at least." Sprig summed up his situation based on the hypothetical scenario, as he looked down at his human hands for a moment.

Maddie nodded.

"Well, I guess it beats being stuck like this forever. We're counting on you, Maddie."

"You got it."

End of Chapter