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  [colpse]Chapter One Hundred ay-Four - The Vilge Hidden in the Leaves

  The Beaver Cleaver cut across the sky on a north-westerly course that had us flying over hills and an endless untamed forest where the occasional river broke up the sea of green.

  Howard took a bit to get used to the perspective. It was hard to navigate using familiar ndmarks when you were seeing those ndmarks from above. Still, once he got us going in the right dire it retty smooth sailing, with only the occasional course corre to fly past a specifid in a river or past a formation of rocks.

  Hopsalot wasn’t that far from Insmouth. The two days of travel time seemed to be mostly because there wasn’t an actual road betweewo vilges, and because Howard’s route twisted and turned with the ndscape instead of darting straight towards Hopsalot.

  Being in the air gave us a big advah that. By the time noon was rolling around and our lunchtime sandwiches were nearly doh, we could see little trails of smoke ing up fast ahead.

  “Let’s circle around halfway and anchor ourselves o the vilge,” I said. “Do you know if there are any fields near Hopsalot we use?” I asked Howard.

  “Sure, there are a few. They have a lot of trees iown, but there are some opeoo.”

  “What you tell us about the people from there? Are they nice?”

  Howard’s face took on a strange expression for a moment. “They’re certainly nice, yes. Perhaps too much so. Though I haven’t been here in nearly half a decade.”

  I didn’t know what that could even mean, but maybe Howard had gotten a strange receptio time he’d been here. Hopsalot grew close enough that I was able to make out the town, or at least some of it. There was a river in the middle of it that switched bad forth, with bridges crossing it here and there, ahe tre of town was a big building with a waterwheel on one side.

  The problem was that there were only maybe a dozen other buildings I could see between all the trees.

  Then I noticed the homes built atop the trees and it clicked.

  “It’s a vilge of tree houses!” I said.

  “Yeah, buo like building in strange ways,” Howard said.

  I blinked. “Buns?”

  “Yeah, your sort of folk,” Howard said with a gesture to my head.

  I got excited and leaned over the figureheads as we crossed over the hilly little town. I noticed little gardens a little rows of bushes here and there, as well as long-eared heads turning up to stare at us as we coasted by. Clive was at the wheel, so our turn and stop was textbook-perfed soon enough we were dropping our anchors by the edge of the town.

  “I think we’ll be using the same away team as st time,” I said as I hopped onto the deck. “Amaryllis, Awen, Bastion if you want to e. And of course Mister Howard. We’re kinda here for you, after all.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” Howard said. “I’ll be ho and say that these old bones of mine are looking forward to being on solid ground again.”

  I patted him on the back, then shuffled over to the dders to lower them down.

  Bastio off the side, wings buzzing, then because she couldn’t be shown up by a Sylph, Amaryllis jumped off too. Awen and I stared at each other and shared an eye roll before she started down with the dder.

  I just walked off the edge of the ship and nded in a crouch at the bottom where I could hold the dder taut to help Awen and Howard e down.

  The moment everyone was down I set my hands on my hips and surveyed the town of Hopsalot. No greeting party? Didn’t they worry any?

  The town was idyllic. They had cute little homes set up in the branches of trees and with doors and porches painted in soft pastels, and some of the bigger hills I’d noticed from above were actually burrows, with big doors set in their sides and sometimes big round windows that let us peek into living rooms and kits. That’s where the smoke was ing from, smoke that smelled like fresh bread and roasting veggies.

  The town had a bunch of cobbled nes criss-crossing it, and everywhere the road met the stream gurgling through the town there would be a little arched bridge with carefully tooled rails carved into fanciful shapes.

  There were people too. Buns! With big ears and bigger smiles. They mostly wore earthy clothes, the men in overalls and the women in long summer dresses covered with aprons at the front. They seemed like very nice people. Plenty of them were gathering in clumps o gardens or at interses to point at the Beaver.

  What really caught my eye was the row of rabbit ears poking out from behind a nearby hilltop.

  They wiggled and waved, and sometimes they’d rise up a little and I’d catch a glimpse of big curious eyes staring from uhe brim of flower-yellos.

  It seemed, muy glee, that little buns grew their ears out before the rest of their body caught up. Like puppies with too-big ears. Mine were not quite two feet tall, and so were the little buns!

  That meant that some of them were nearly a third ear i and it was adorable. And they all had big rounded cheeks, and huge eyes, and I wao hug them so bad!

  I squealed and waved to the group, only for them to scream and hide away. Not a terrified scream, but a happy pyful one. “I like this pce,” I annouo my friends.

  “I noticed,” Amaryllis deadpanned.

  “How you not like it?” I asked her. “It’s so cute!”

  She rolled her birdy eyes and sighed. “It is quite nice, yes. A bit primitive, but at least it’s .”

  “Someone’s ing,” Bastion said.

  I looked over and noticed that he was quite right, a woman was walking our way, trailed by six teeny tiny buns who were using her skirt as cover to peek at us. o her was a huge sb of a man, like a walking wall of muscle. He had a big hammer looped to his belt, and one of his ears looked like it had been chewed off in the middle. The dy stopped some dozen steps away and crossed her arms under her chest. “Hello there!” she called.

  I hopped forward, sg the little buns into hiding behind the dy until only the tip of their ears poked out.

  “Hi there!” I said. “My name is Broccoli Bunch, captain of the Beaver Cleaver!”

  The dy hummed. “Oh my, I’m the mayoress of Hopsalot, you call me Momma,” she said. “You don’t look like one of my buns.”

  “Oh?” I asked. “Yeah, I’m not from around here. These are my friends, Awen, Amaryllis, and Bastion, and that’s mister Howard, he’s from Insmouth to the south.”

  “A harpy, a human, a sylph, and a fishman neighbour. Oh my, oh my,” Momma said. “Wele, everyoo Hopsalot. We don’t have much, but what we do have is yours. I hope we bee good friends.”

  I nodded super fast. “I hope that too! Your town is very pretty.”

  “Thank you,” Momma said. “But it’s not the town that matters, it’s the people living in it. I’d like to think that the town’s just a refle of the people within.”

  I decided that I liked Momma. “That’s a nice way of thinking!”

  “Are you a sky pirate?”

  The question came from a tiny head poking out from behind Momma’s skirt. A little bun girl, her head tilted down and her ears almost dragging to the ground. She was hugging a little plush doll to her chest, one of the doll’s ears in her mouth.

  “Not teically,” I said. “But we’ve fought pirates before!”

  A bunch more heads popped out, all with expressions varyiween ‘whoa’ and disbelief.

  “I think if you keep on like that you’ll earn yourself quite the following of little listeners,” Momma said. She chuckled and reached back to rub one of the bun’s between the ears.

  “Are they yours?” I asked.

  “Oh my,” Momma said. “Some of them certainly are. We have a lot of little buns here. Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of who is who’s child.”

  “They all just run around?” I asked.

  Momma shrugged. “It’s safe enough around town. As long as they know not to head into the woods. We have some folk keeping watch, of course, and they all have school iernoon. Isn’t that right?”

  There was a chorus of grumbles from the little buns. It seemed as though school wasn’t really popur.

  “Hey, miss captain?” One of the bun boys asked. “ we go on your ship?”

  I smiled. “Nht now. But maybe ter we give you guys a tour?”

  That seemed thten them up a bit.

  “But only if you behave and are good little buns.”

  A few of them defted at that, but some seemed just as eager. “Alright everybun,” Momma said. “I o keep uests pany for a bit, why don’t you all run off and py?”

  “But we wanhe ship!”

  “Ara, you look at it all you want without b uests, right?” Momma asked. Soo all of the little buns to hop away, and a few moments ter there was an eager game of ‘pirates versus good guys’ going on atop one of the nearby hills, with lots of tumbling about and rough-housing and squealing ughter. Momma eyed them all for a bit, then turo us with a smug smile. “That’s taken care of. Now, are there any supplies you need? Or are you just here to rest?”

  “We’re here for business,” I said. “Or, well, Howard here is.”

  “I see,” Momma said. “Why don’t you follow me over to my pce then. I left the cauldron oove with some soup on, and I wouldn’t want it to go to waste.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “We have some veggies and su our ship too, if you want.”

  “Noould I want that?” Momma asked.

  “Well, your food should be to keep all your little buns, and yourself, you ’t just give it all ters like that,” I said. “Not if it meay little tummies.”

  Momma ughed, then she pulled me into a tight-tight hug. “Oh, you’re a sweet little one. But no worries. My garden is still quite plentiful. We won’t run out of carrots and turnips any time soon.”

  Looping my arm in hers, Momma pulled me along and down one of the cobbled paths. Her big friend, the man with the hammer and the broken ear, followed along at a leisurely pace, a tent smile tugging his lips up.

  I saw my friends sharing a look before they started walking to keep up as well.

  Momma’s house was he tre of Hopsalot. It was a stratle home, with half of it built into a hill that had a huge tree atop it, and the other half hanging off said tree. Entrance was little more than a few stoeps leading up to a big round d into the side of the hill.

  Momma ope up aured t right by the entrance. “Please wipe your paws,” she said. “I do enough dusting as it is.”

  Nodding, I took my shoes off, then used some ing magi them before pg them onto a raext to the doorway. I helped my friends off their boots too, just in case.

  The interior was very snug, with a low-ish ceiling and a bunall corridors broken up by arches every so often, all lit with the e-y light of a few mps hanging from the walls.

  Momma led us to the dining room, which was a long, curved room with a curved table in its middle with a mixed assortment of chairs and stools all around it. There weren’t any windows, but there were plenty of little paintings hanging from the walls with deserts and forests and pretty mountains on them.

  “So,” Momma said as she sat at the head of the table a her elbows down. “What did you want to talk about?”

  ***

  RavensDagger

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