Mineisha’s story, part two

What we’ve all been waiting for, including me I admit: Installment Number Two of Mineisha’s Adventure!

[This post was imported on 4/10/14 from my old blog at satsumabug.livejournal.com. The original link is broken, but I’ve pasted the text below, without my illustrations.]

Mineisha’s Adventure

Chapter Two

Mineisha jumped into the mouth-shaped hole. But instead of falling straight down, she stayed suspended, as if she was in a bowl full of Jell-O. Inside the hole was perfectly quiet. Mineisha couldn’t see the street or the house or Mr. Snafu anymore, but the air inside the hole smelled fresh and clean. She moved her arms and legs. This made her spin around in a slow circle. All around her the walls of the hole were pink, and they shimmered like sunshine on water. Mineisha tried to touch the walls, but she couldn’t reach them She waved her arms and kicked her legs, but still she only stayed in one place. It was like a little like swimming, but much harder. It was even more like running in your dreams, when you run and run and can’t go anywhere.

Mineisha looked up, she looked down, but up and down and all around was nothing but pink. She started to panic. “I’m going to be stuck here forever!” she thought. “How am I going to get home in time for spaghetti and meatballs?”

Suddenly, the Jell-O feeling disappeared, and Mineisha began to fall. Her stomach flipped like she was on a roller coaster. For two and a half minutes she just fell, and fell, and fell, straight down. All of a sudden, her legs hit something and she sat down. But still she didn’t stop; she just kept whooshing forward. It was like sitting on a very fast slide. The slide had bumps in it, and Mineisha went up and down with them. Sometimes the slide turned to the right, sometimes to the left. All around her everything had changed from pink to totally black, like a perfect night sky. There were even white specks like stars. Fortunately, Mineisha doesn’t get dizzy easily, and she was having a great time. She thought, “I am never going to find a roller coaster as exciting as this!” Then she heard strange sounds and felt a soft breeze, and suddenly, she could see something. Ahead of her was a huge field covered in short spiky plants. Half of them were green, and half were purple. They looked like squashed porcupines. Past the field there were strange-looking buildings, and beyond those were dark green and dark purple hills. Even though the sky was black with white specks, it was not dark, and Mineisha could see shapes moving around between the buildings.

She whooshed closer and closer to the field, and after one more little bump, she landed in the field among the plants.

The plants were softer than they looked, and Mineisha’s landing was comfortable. Before she had a chance to look around, Mr. Snafu tumbled out of the air and landed just a few feet away from her.

“Hello, Mineisha,” he said cheerfully. “Did you like the tunnel ride?”

Mineisha said yes.

“Well, then,” said Mr. Snafu, “welcome to Kog!”

Mineisha looked around her at the squishy plants and the green and purple mountains and the strange buildings. “Mr. Snafu,” she said, “what is Kog? Is it a planet?”

“I can’t explain everything to you right now, Mineisha,” said Mr. Snafu, “But no, Kog is not a planet. We are now inside the planet Earth.”

Mineisha thought about this for a moment. “But we learned in school that the inside of earth is really hot. No one can live there.”

Mr. Snafu sighed. “That’s what I don’t have time to explain. Your scientists think they know everything, but they really don’t.”

It was clear that Mr. Snafu wasn’t going to say any more. He stood up and motioned to Mineisha to follow him. They began walking together toward the buildings.

“These buildings,” said Mr. Snafu, “are our farmhouses. We grow many plants here, but we depend on bittens and quellies to provide most of our food.”

Next to each farmhouse, there was a field with a fence around it. Inside the field there were some spiny blue balls on green stems, and some green stems with nothing on them. “These blue plants are bittens,” Mr. Snafu explained.

“We eat the fruit inside, but the outside is prickly. It takes us a long time to harvest the bittens because we have to be careful not to poke ourselves. But the garkles wear thick brown mittens that protect their hands.”

Just then, a small, furry red creature ran into the farmyard. It looked like a big mouse, with a short tail like a rabbit’s. It ran up to a bitten and stood under it. Suddenly a whole stream of the little red animals poured into the yard. Many of them did the same thing as the first one, running up to a bitten and standing under it. Then the others jumped on top of those, and more jumped on top of those, until they made a tower. Then the top one took out a pair of brown mittens and put them on. It grabbed the spiky bitten, and jumped back down again. All the other red animals jumped down too, and they gathered around and ate the bitten. Then they made more towers next to other bittens, and ate those too. This all happened very fast.

“Are those the garkles?” Mineisha asked Mr. Snafu. “They’re so small!”

“Yes,” replied Mr. Snafu. “They don’t look dangerous, but you can see they work very fast. In just a few minutes they can eat the entire field. They’ve already eaten half of our bittens. Before long they may eat them all, and then they will start on the quellies. If they eat all the quellies, we will have no food.”

By the time Mr. Snafu had finished saying this, the garkles had finished the bittens in that field. Most of them ran away, but one hopped up to Mineisha and Mr. Snafu. It looked like it was laughing at them. It started to speak, in a high-pitched, chirpy voice, like a chipmunk in a cartoon:

“We are the garkles! We’ll eat all your bittens!
We grab them fast with our brown woolly mittens!
Pretty soon now we’ll eat all your quellies,
And nothing will be left to fill up your bellies!
Ha ha ha ha . . .”