6 FEBRUARY, SATURDAY, LATER
Once satisfied of Mate's true Disney Princess identity, I felt good enough about my decision-making skills to take a bath. Sinking into the Sakura-smelling foam, I watched my knees pop in and out, like mountains surrounded by clouds...
And then I had the most incredible idea—what if, instead of building up, we built Princess Town down? What if we didn't cut any of the trees? What if we made an underground city?
There was a book about this. I got out of the tub, nearly sliding onto my naked butt, but I caught the sink. Seriously! Why didn't I think of that sooner?
It's like that human guy who jumped out of the bath shouting "Eureka." Suddenly I understood the meaning of the word.
Eureka! I've got it. I shifted and shook out, then shifted out to my room and pulled on my clothes. I barely had time to marvel at the way the cropped cardigan fit, covering my arms and shoulder and the exposed part of my back. If I didn't take it off, you wouldn't know it was a halter.
Then I grabbed my leather jacket, stepped into the matching short black boots, and ran downstairs. Pulling open the glass door, I ran out across the lawn, slipping and sliding down the icy, muddy sections like an action movie and running into the Packhouse before the warrior stationed there could get the door for me. I raced up the stairs to the library and slowed at the shelves of books.
It should be around here somewhere. I was sure of it. There was a book here about the Green Mountain.
The Green Mountain was the mountain where rogue wolves originally ran to. But over time, they formed their own packs and grew rather powerful. They had hidden their power in the form of hidden villages. From the top, they looked like poor wooden huts grouped together for weak bands of rogues. But these were only hidden doors to the vast underground and technologically advanced (and somewhat shady) cities they had built below.
At the beginning, every hut had a trapdoor because they were just bands of weak rogues with nowhere else to go. If the Gyaras (the magical wild beasts in the Mountains) attacked, or another rogue pack attacked, they would hide underground.
But later, these underground hideouts evolved to join into central cravens, and then to hold medical and food supplies, and then to hide treasures, secret communication base, etc. Little by little, the wolves in the Green Mountain carved out the entire mountain and fashioned it into a metropolis with an underground train and logistics rail system and many other wonders.
There were some paintings, but most of the words were in Ancient Lycan, so I let my lucky sense of direction find it.
I found it, in a yellow leather binding. Why? It was a Green Mountain book; shouldn't it be green?
Unlike the Colored Mountains, where the color of the mountain was named after certain characteristics of the place or the wolves there, the colors of the Packlands here were chosen at random.
The story went that the greatest alphas gathered after the great war to divide up the Packlands, and they used whatever colored pens they had to draw the boundaries. So, of course, they had a blue pen, black pen, green pen, and red pen. The Grey Packlands was the land marked out with pencil. White was drawn in correction tape. And I remembered yellow was a highlighter.
Now, the Colored Mountains didn't get drawn on an old map. The Colored Mountains were born by magic, one after another, and named as they were born.
Like the Black, Grey, and White Mountains, which were named after the dominant color of the wolves who lived there.
Red Mountain was home to the brown wolves, because the strongest and largest wolves on the mountain were known for their rusty red coloring—which was why I felt quite sure that Harvey was some direct descendant of a pretty big-shot Red Mountain wolf.
Green Mountain wolves were of mixed colors and heritage, but their mountain was the greenest all year round.
Orange Mountain was named for the orange trees. It was the newest mountain civilization.
Or at least the newest one from the time some of the wolves left the Colored Mountains and started living in the plains. We had no newer books to tell us what happened in the Colored Mountains after that.
It was like the Colored Mountains disappeared. I mean, the mountains were physically still there, but the magic around them was like a dense mist, and despite several attempts to find the great wolf civilizations via satellite cameras, etc., nothing could be found.
Those who tried to find it the good old-fashioned way never returned to tell about it.
Dad had said that if you wanted to go to the Colored Mountains, there was only one way in and one way out. You needed to go through Gate City.
Not our Gate City. The real one on the Mountains. If you followed the map in some of our books (Dad had collected quite a number of them), there were accounts and careful instructions concerning how to go there. It's a dangerous journey. It's easy to leave but hard to return. Only a true heart would find it. (Wth is a true heart? Let me know if you figure it out.)
It's said the ruling wolf king would sit on the throne in their Gate City once a week to listen to the appeals of the visitors there. If you could get to Gate City, you could ask him for anything.
There was no record saying that he would necessarily give what you asked for... It just said you could ask for it.
When you read Ancient Lycan, you have to pay attention not just to what was written, but also to what was not written.
And if there was a painting, it was part of the words, too.
It's very frustrating to study, but it can also be very rewarding.
I'm just saying all the stuff that Mrs. Beta, Beta Lucas, and Dad had told me while trying to teach it to me.
Only Alphas read and wrote the language now. Beta Lucas had learned with Dad while they were growing up.
Mrs. Beta was from a scholar family. It's like a wolf lineage that was predominantly scholars and teachers. They travelled a lot and offered tutelage to alpha families around the continent. Mrs. Beta only saw them once every two years, when they gathered for a reunion.
I heard that Mrs. Beta's dad used to teach a special Alpha literacy class in the Black Forest Academy. They still had Ancient Lycan as a subject there, but it was only open to beta and alpha families.
Why bother? I've always wondered. It's not like any of us were going to go back to the Mountains.
Okay, so Dad was planning to.
And I guess if I could, I would try to go back one day, too. Just to look for Heller and the girl, Adelina. And if Fluffy were still with me, I'd bring him, too.
I wondered how on earth Heller was planning to come here, and how he planned to take Fluffy home.
I went over to the library balcony. The row of evergreen trees blocked most of the hill where Princess Town would reside.
Maybe the top part will be like Orange Mountain. We would build a very pretty town with a lovely park, cafes, shopping, entertainment, and then the rest of the town underground, like Green Mountain.
What? You thought I was going to build shabby wooden huts? Hahaha. That might be my dad's retirement dream once upon a time, but I'm with Mum on this one. A secluded hut without running water or electricity wasn't my idea of a nice place to live, either.
Paper... Or something... I took the yellow-bound book over to the desk in the library. Rummaging in the drawer, I found a pen without a cap and some recycled paper. Tearing up the paper into long strips, I used them to mark the pages with the underground city information. Then I found the book about the picturesque Orange City of Orange Mountain, home of the artisans and farmers. Actually, that sounded like a nice description for Night Forest, too.
Okay, photocopy!
I went to the copier room on the third floor. The offices were strangely quiet. Weird... I know it's Saturday, but lately, with the mess in the Red Packlands, etc., our admin office worked Saturdays. Maybe the mess cleared up enough for them to go home. Either that, or it's past six...
I looked up at the clock above a copier. Guess what time it was? I'll give you a clue. It was past 6.
Actually, it was nearly 7.
I finished the copy and checked the mindlinks. Naturally, the Beta channel was on fire. (Mainly Ben, though.)
KI: {Pop! I can't believe you lost the goddess again.}
BEN: {I can always...}
HARV: {We've talked about this, Ben. We do not force open a mindlink with the Alpha except for emergencies.}
BEN: {But...}
KI: {You had one job, Beta}.
BEN: {Shut up, dog.}
KI: {No, I'm not shutting up, Beta. I had to cook dinner, entertain the guests, and deal with this popping red tree issue. What the pop is with the trees suddenly?}
HARV: {Calm down. One thing at a time. Ben, hunt down the princess. I'll make the excuse and help serve. Ki, finish up in the kitchen.}
BEN: {I found her. She's on the link, watching us freak out.}
...
I guess I was found out, but I wasn't watching them freak out on purpose. I was just trying to figure out what the commotion was about.
BEN: {Where are you, Sam?}
ME: {Don't worry! I'm coming!}
I sprinted back to the library, jammed the Orange Mountain reference back into the shelf, slotted the photocopy of Orange City into the yellow-bound book about Green Mountain, and then sprinted back home.
Ben opened the sliding door for me from the living room. I rushed through and followed him. We jumped over the sofa in our way and crashed into the dining room.
"Princess is here," Ben announced.
The dining room table had a pullout and was now expanded to seat all our guests. Savy was here, too. I noticed at once she had on the red halter, but with a white jacket over it. It looked nice.
"Sam, where were you?" Mum sighed. "Never mind, come sit down."
Ben pulled out a chair for me.
I sat down. Ki served my canapé and poured the water for me before retreating back to the kitchen, where the betas were sitting on barstools across the kitchen counter with their own meals.
And the conversation resumed around the table. Mum was a gracious and delightful hostess. Savy and Sabre quietly ate their food—mostly because they were not quite at home with so many new faces, but it gave them the effect of a pair of perfect doll daughters.
"Is something the matter, Sam?" Mum asked when she noticed I hadn't touched my main course. "The wings are boneless."
I'm not Savy! I didn't mind the bones.
"Sorry, I was just thinking about other things," I muttered.
"Actually, you've been out of it since you ran off just now," Henry said. "Anything I can help with?"
"You'll just tell me to do what earns more money," I sulked and poked at my wing.
"Try me," Henry said.
"I was thinking of moving Princess Town partially underground," I said, "so we won't have to dam up the stream or cut down so many trees."
Henry made a face. "Why? Are the trees valuable?"
I face-palmed. "Yes, you can use them to make paper... to print money on."
Henry laughed at that, but then he said more seriously, "Underground building isn't straightforward. You need specialists to come do a reading of the ground. And even so, there aren't any guarantees. It could end up costing you a lot more, especially if your digging work unearths an underground spring or a sandy patch that is unstable, or worse, hard rock that would be costly to break through."
"You seemed to know a lot about digging underground." I eyed him suspiciously. I wondered if there were other packs that had tried to emulate Green Mountain blueprints.
Henry shook his head. "I only heard some interesting stories about a pack that was building too deep underground and would end up needing to borrow huge amounts of money at very high interest. It's literally being caught between a rock and a hard place, Sam."
Henry laughed at his own joke.
I supposed Henry's pack were the generous lender.
I sighed. So much for my Eureka moment.
"Plus, you'd still have to dig up the trees, you know," Marcus informed me. "I mean, logically, you need to clear a space large enough to make a giant crater before building up from the bottom."
I imagined making a giant crater in the prettiest hill. But that wasn't how Green Mountain was built.
Suddenly, I felt like a little girl clutching a book of nursery rhymes and insisting that we could find a goose large enough to fly on.
"Cheer up, Sam. We could plant new trees after the town is built." Mum tried to console me. "At any rate, you have plenty of time to worry about the trees tomorrow. Your friends are here today. The girls were just saying how much they were looking forward to the party later."
Oh yeah. I must be the worst kind of terrible host, leaving my friends to my betas and then showing up late for dinner all gloomy.
"Okay! Party!" I yelled and ate one of the chicken wings. Oh, it's so yum. My mouth was happy to be alive.
Mum sighed. "Is she like this in school, too?"
My friends looked at me and then nodded.
"She's always daydreaming and then saying something weird," Zara told Mum.
"Zara! Don't say it like that!" Krystal scolded. To my mum, Krystal tried to amend Zara's comment. "She isn't always daydreaming, Mrs. King."
"Uh, yeah," Zara quickly agreed. "Sometimes she's also reading manga."
"I didn't know school was so relaxing nowadays!" Mum mused.