The Trade Route

Lithuania reappeared on a road in the middle of the woods. She looked around her, ill at ease. She had expected to reappear back in the hollow. Then again, maybe the hollow’s magical protection prevented anyone from teleporting back into it. Or maybe she hadn’t quite gotten the hang of this teleporting business—which was the more likely possibility. At any rate, she could tell she was in LusciousLocks. The sky was dark as ever, and the pervasive stillness of the air was unmistakable. The hollow had to be nearby.

She wandered into the forest, mulling over what she had just witnessed in Nilbmah, all the while guided by some blind instinct she trusted was somehow linking her to her sisters. As far as she knew, Nilbmah had never had anything to do with anything. Yet Winfry and Isa were from Nilbmah, and they were, for reasons unknown to her, quite involved in the mess she herself was in. She supposed a good talk with Winfry and Isa was in order—at least to understand the state of affairs in Nilbmah and get an idea of how everything was related. Thought that might be easier said than done. More than once, Lithuania had probed Winfry and Isa, unsuccessfully. They were oddly secretive—in fact, they were just plain odd. Were they an item, or just cuddle buddies? Were they socially retarded, or just like every other Nilbmahian out there? She had had very little experience with people from Nilbmah, so she couldn’t be sure, but as far as she knew, they were mostly just a bunch of lazy hooligans whose country didn’t go down the pipes thanks to the grace of some divine providence no one knew of.

At any rate, Winfry and Isa were weird, and Lithuania suspected it would take longer than was pleasant for her to extract information from them. Hopefully they’d be honest and shed some light on how they had doppelgangers, and how the hell those had come to be in the first place. Had they made it out of the tunnels alive? Surely Winfry could figure the answer out with his librem.

The librem. Lithuania kicked a twig as she ambled through the forest. She had had her suspicions about that book being a scam. Winfry got so paranoid when Latvia touched it, Lithuania suspected Winfry must be hiding something about it. And yet, the damn book spoke truths, and yielded results. Not to mention it held ridiculously powerful magic. But how Winfry had acquired his librem, how the librem worked, where Isa had snatched up her quilaire—all those questions, the little couple from Nilbmah refused to reveal. “Crazy pair of hallucinating nutbags,” Lithuania mumbled.

She became aware of her surroundings again once she noticed she was walking once again on dirt, not forest topsoil. She was back on the road. “The hell?” she muttered, looking around her, confused. Had she been walking in circles?

And then, in the distance, she heard a dull drone. The sound of something large and mechanical. The thickness of the trees didn’t allow for Lithuania to get a clear picture of what was coming around the road’s bend, but anticipating that whatever was driving the machine was most likely conscious, and therefore not LusciousLockian, she dove into the brush near the roadside and waited.

A minute later, a large metallic tank rolled into view. Lithuania could tell by its style and build that it most certainly was not LusciousLockian. It was jet black, with glowing red stripes lining its grooves and angles, which faintly reminded Lithuania of the appearance of cooling lava. It was everything Lithuania would’ve expected from an AssMachenstani tank.  

Another minute passed, and the tank was gone. Lithuania arose from her hiding place and left the road behind, delving deeper into the woods, this time with more purpose. She had found an AssMachenstani trade route—her first real lead. She could trace it with the others, and find the AssMachenstani base in LusciousLocks—that would be a huge deal.

Lithuania found her way back the hollow after a mere ten-minute trek, and smiled when she noticed everyone was still sound asleep. No one had even noticed she was gone, except—

“Where the hell have you been?” said Felix, tugging Lithuania out into the clearing around the hollow and out of earshot from everyone else.

“Felix,” Lithuania smiled sheepishly. “I’m so sorry I dropped you from—”

“Forget it. Forget it,” Felix said, poorly concealing his wounded pride. “Where the hell have you been?”

Lithuania told him about Nilbmah, about the AssMachenstani trade route nearby, and about her resolve to thoroughly question Winfry and Isa. Felix was skeptical about that part. But he was psyched about the trade route. “We can finally get off our asses and actually do something,” he said. “I say we take over a tank.”

At first Lithuania thought he was joking. When she realized he wasn’t, she simply stared at him blankly. “That’s about the stupidest thing we could—”

“What are you talking about? We could infiltrate them!”

“We could reveal our position and lose the element of surprise.”

 “Or we could obtain valuable information and AssMachenstan will never find out!”

“But if they do find out—we don’t know how they communicate, or—”

The debate continued, and when everyone else woke up, the matter was put to vote. To Lithuania’s chagrin, the vote went in Felix’s favor, mostly because Winfry’s stupid librem suggested his might be the most convenient course of action. So against Lithuania’s will, an action plan was devised, which relied mostly on everyone’s magical abilities, which were thankfully heightened due to some mysterious influence of the hollow, yet still erratic and rather unpredictable due to the three sisters’ lack of practice. Still, whether it was her plan or not, Lithuania didn’t doubt they needed to move as soon as possible. She just never suspected she’d soon be wishing she’d known how terribly wrong things were about to go.