Twigs and the Giant Option Ab2: Steal the Giant’s Hat
It’s time to see how our January adventure finishes.
To recap: You were investigating an old man concerning the food heists happening along the road into the town, Layfatte. While sitting in his cabin, the trunk by his bed gave a thump. When you investigated, you found clothing, and no bottom in the trunk. The old man donned his hat while you were distracted and grew into a giant. To escape, you dove into the trunk with a tiny, twig like creature. Once inside, the giant locked you in, and you met all the twiglets the giant has imprisoned. He forces them to steal food for him because he has their matriarch. When the giant next reaches in to gather a crew for another food heist, you all attacked him. While the twiglets tied his boots together, you knocked him over and have now decided to steal the hat that give him his giant size. (If you’d like to read the first three parts, click here and here and here.)
Although the matriarch looks rattled from being shaken around in the jar, she appears unharmed where she braces against the glass. You focus then on the ratty hat atop the giant’s head.
He’s still lying on his back amidst the rubble of the table, so the hat’s not out of your reach. You bolt for it before the giant can sit up, vaulting over a chunk of the shattered table and reaching for the hat at the same time.
The giant had started to lower his hand to swat the twiglets but he catches your movement and slaps his hand on top of his head just as your fingers close around the brim. With the momentum of your jump, you pull the hat almost free but then those thick fingers squash the material against the giant’s thinning white hair.
Your jump stalls midair and you hit the floor with a huff, but you still have ahold of the hat’s brim.
The giant’s muscles bunch, giving you a second’s warning before he jerks upright. You grab for the edge of the cold stove with your free hand and hold tight when he moves. Your own back muscles protest but you hold tight. There’s a sharp ripping and you slump to the floor with a chunk of the hat in your hand.
Everything goes still and you feel the hair on your arms stand straight up. There’s a concussion to the air that, if you hadn’t already been on the floor, would have flattened you. It washes outward through the cabin and out through the walls, throwing everything outward in its wake.
Twiglets fly through the air and you watch, unable to move, as Inslee sails out the window. The giant hits the wall, and goes right through it, but he loses hold of the glass jar with the matriarch. The jar falls, hitting the edge of the fire box with its load of wood, and shatters, leaving her in a ring of sparkling glass on the dirt floor.
When everything stills again, your ears feel packed with cotton, then give a high-pitched whine before sound comes back to you like a slow-moving wave.
Squee and several other twiglets dash to the matriarch so you head for the hole in the wall to find the giant.
Stepping through, you freeze.
Sure enough, the giant’s now a scrawny old man who lies on his back cackling like you just told a great joke.
But it’s not the sight of the old man that stopped you. When you approached the cabin during your investigation, it was in the middle of nowhere, but you could still see the mountains in the distance and the forest that obscured any sight of the cabin from the road.
You can still see such things, but they’re huge and very far away.
There’s a pulling on your pant leg. You look down to find Inslee, ant sized, trying to climb up the fabric. You reach down and pick him up.
The old man runs out of breath. Gasping, he still manages to say, “Y’ let it loose. Y’re twiglet sized now.”
“You’re twiglet sized too,” you shoot back.
He grins and it’s not a pretty sight. “Only till I recover me brim.”
Realizing his intent, you flee back into the shrunken cabin before he can stand up.
“Time to go,” you shout to the twiglets as you pass from the hole in the wall to the door on the far side.
As you run by, twiglets jump onto your legs and shoes until you’re running with dozens of them attached to your legs.
The old man gives chase, but you’re now the same size and he’s much older. You lose him in the trees on the far side of the cabin.
***
“He won’t stops till he’s got his hat whole again,” Squee says that evening as you sit in the bowl of a tree, hiding.
You hold the brim of the hat in your hand, considering. “What if we make the hat whole again? Can it return us to normal size?”
The Matriarch, Annaslee, shakes her head. “No ways to says,” she admits, “but the giants gots to wear the hat to be big.”
You realize the problem. You don’t know of a way to release the power in the hat all at once like what happened when it ripped.
Inslee crawls up onto your knee. Since the twiglets are still the same relative size to you as before, being around them helps you feel normal despite sitting inside a tree like a baby bird.
“What ifs we unweaves the hat?” he asks. “We’s okay being smalls and if the hat don’t exist, he can’t ever be bigs again.”
They all look at you because, as Inslee said, they don’t mind remaining small. Is it so bad a choice? Inslee reaches out to take hold of your pinky finger. He’s got such a hopeful look on his narrow face. Now that you know such magic exists in the world, there’s no telling what other options exist out there, but you do know the giant doesn’t care for anything but his food. You make your choice.
“If we unweave it,” you say, “we should steal his portion of the hat too. There’s no telling if he can make part of it work.”
The twiglets grin. “We’s can do that.”
The End
Thank you for joining in the adventure! It’s so much fun to see what options everyone chooses. February will start a whole new story, so stay tuned for new choices =)
Blessings
Jennifer
