[crow]

The way he remembered it, the fish, or whatever, that they had seen seemed to be... glowing.

He could have asked Milo to confirm, since Milo had seen it too, but a part of him was scared to. If Milo confirmed it, then that would have meant they had both seen it that way. And that would have meant that, in the middle of the back woods at night, they'd encountered a glowing flying fish just making its way through the trees.

[Bonus Thread 57]

[crow]

He was probably just having some strange dream in bed, right? Maybe he had eaten something strange before he'd gone to sleep, and that was why. He didn't think he had, but it was hard to remember. It was sort of hard to concentrate on much of anything anymore.

If this was a dream then it sure was taking a funny approach to all this. What kind of dream was so realistic at the beginning, only to fall apart the further you went like this?

[Bonus Thread 58]

[crow]

The details had really been too drab and mundane in the first half, when he had been sneaking out of the house and going to get Milo. And then, this... What was all this supposed to mean anyway? If it was going to be weird, it might as well have just started off that way, and save him the second guessing.

And for that matter, why was he even suspicious? If this was a dream, was he supposed to even have room to suspect anything?

[Bonus Thread 59]

[crow]

Kip remembered quite a few of his dreams, and the thing was, weird things happened in a lot of them, as they did in dreams, but they made perfect sense when he was in it. Dream logic was pretty interesting like that. It could concoct whole background stories and worldviews and convoluted laws of dream physics, so he believed in all of it as it was happening. But clearly that wasn't what was happening here...

"Hey, Earth to Kip. Are you listening?" said Milo.

[Bonus Thread 60]

[crow]

Kip blinked to find that a hand was being waved back and forth in front of his face--- Milo's mitted hand--- and he briefly startled before returning to himself.

"Oh," he said, shaking his head. "My bad. Were you saying something?" He hadn't even realized that he had zoned out like that. It wasn't like him to lose awareness of his surroundings like that. In fact, it was the kind of thing that tended to happen to Milo more than it did to him.  

[Bonus Thread 61]

[crow]

Maybe he was more unsettled by the state of things in these woods than he had thought.

"No, I just thought we should maybe get moving," Milo said. He looked behind him, as though he expected to see something... Another fish, maybe, or his parents, following their tracks after discovering him missing from his bed.

That little gesture brought the full force of reality back to Kip, and he suddenly felt a lot sorrier for his blanking out than he had a moment ago.  

[Bonus Thread 62]

[crow]

Milo... Milo had to get back before his parents noticed he was gone, or else there would be hell to pay. There would be hell to pay for the both of them.

True enough that it was probably better if Kip returned before his folks suspected anything either, but Kip's folks weren't that sharp. They wouldn't think to check--- or more likely they just didn't care. It would give them an excuse to be mad at him if they found out, sure, but...

[Bonus Thread 63]

[crow]

The thing about Kip's parents was that they didn't go out of their way to look for it, the way Milo's parents would have done, checking on him on a regular basis.

And Kip's parents would only blame him, was the thing. Whatever else he might say about them, at least Kip had the assurance that they didn't drag other people into his messes. Milo's parents knew about Kip, and they already didn't approve of the fact that he was friends with their son.

[Bonus Thread 64]

[crow]

Kip and Milo were probably only a couple of incidents away from being separated by force, all Romeo and Juliet style, just without the kissing and the romantic poetry.

"Sorry," Kip said. "You're right, we should probably keep moving." He turned around, already half decided to just go back home and... figure something else out, but it was Milo who put a hand on his shoulder to stop him.

"I didn't mean going home," Milo said, correcting Kip with a shake of his own head.

[Bonus Thread 65]

[crow]

He looked a little embarrassed as Kip blinked at him, glancing down and away, confusion writ clear on his features. Perhaps he felt that he had a reputation, and perhaps he felt that the reputation was undeserved... Or that it was deserved, but he regretted the actions that had led up to it.

Regardless, he pressed on and said, "Look, we both know that we saw something, and that something was weird, right? I want to get to the bottom of this."

[Bonus Thread 66]

[crow]

This time, when he looked up, it was in the direction they had been heading in, the direction in which they had seen the floating fish.

"Yeah?" said Kip. To say that he was surprised would have been an understatement. Milo wasn't really the one of the two of them with a taste for adventure, and it was usually Kip talking him into escapades, half of which he ended up regretting getting into, if you believed the way he went on about them.

[Bonus Thread 67]

[crow]

Kip suspected he actually regretted less of that number, but was too proud to admit it. Not that he said this though, since it was a pretty surefire way to start an argument.

The point stood though that Milo wasn't really the one who usually initiated this kind of hare-brained suggestion. And it was a hare-brained suggestion, however appealing it might have been to Kip. No, in fact, you could sort of tell how harebrained it was specifically because it was appealing to Kip, who dealt a lot more in that sort of thing.

[Bonus Thread 68]

[crow]

It was why none of the teachers at school liked him. Kip by himself was bad enough, but when he tried to talk the other boys into it...

But hey, given those facts, who was he to say no? If Milo was on board...

A little voice in the back of his head nagged at him that if he knew there would be risks, he ought to be talking his friend out of it. But it was the kind of reasonable idea that Kip was all too happy to ignore.

[Bonus Thread 69]

[crow]

Instead of doing that, he grinned, wide and goofy and excited. "Alright, let's do it. We're going to be detectives. We're going to blow this one wide open and show those other guys at school what's what!"

Milo looked less enthused about the prospect of proving everyone wrong than Kip did, but hey, he wasn't backing out. That was what mattered. He merely nodded, and the two of them set forth with a renewed conviction, determined now to find that fish again.

[Bonus Thread 70]

[crow]

As it turned out, they didn't even have to wait that long. And here they thought they were going to have to go on this hunt for the things.

It was as if the two of them had crossed some sort of threshold when they had made that decision. Or maybe the threshold had been a physical one, a barrier or edge of territory that they had crossed without knowing. Whatever it was, it didn't take them long at all to see the fish again after that.

[Bonus Thread 71]