Fireclaw walked around the explosion site, not sure what to make out of it, when suddenly a garbled voice from behind him, was there still any injured dragons, cats or familiars left under the wreckage some of the explosions had made?!
He turned around, and what he saw wasn't a dragon in need of help, but Fluffy the Shade Cat. He could have sworn Fluffy had said ''Excuse me dragon?''. He stared at Fluffy, and Fluffy continued to talk in a very distorted voice.
Fireclaw focused hard on what the cat was telling him, and after putting the shreds of words together into something that sounded like a normal sentence, he realized that Fluffy was asking him to help Toby!
... Can you please help box big scary ...
... Toby box in my HOUSE to stop ... . He ... but is stuck??? come help?
Maybe it was a trap in order to lure him in to The Shade's dimension, so he wasn't sure how to proceed, but Fluffy began running towards a wall and warped right through it, with no window for Fireclaw to follow him.
''Huh, maybe he was earnest and really wanted my help?!'' Fluffy must have seen that Fireclaw hesitated, and thus went on their way to find someone else to rescue Toby. ''But why on Sornieth would Toby be in Fluffy's dimension???'' Fireclaw was left nonplussed, but after a while he realized that the smoke of magic dust and vials seemed to be re-energizing him; it was a weird feeling.
Once back at the guestroom, Unknown had just showed up an hour earlier to rest for a while. Upon seeing how exhausted he looked, Glacynea made sure to give Fireclaw a hearty meal, while Clarity made sure to use her regenerative magic to help him feel better. They all made sure to welcome Fireclaw's new familiar, the wisp, and Unknown gave Fireclaw a bauble similar to the one Gloomwillow used to retreat to when tired.
Once alone with Unknown, his friend told him that he had yet to discover anything new about The Shade and that strange cat, so he was thrilled to hear about Fireclaw's encounter with Fluffy.
They both agreed that Fireclaw would keep going about his day as normal tomorrow plus try to pick up on what the cats where saying around him, while Unknown would use this new information to figure out what was truly going on in this strange place.
The Dreamkeeper's Clan would be interested in their research, and Fireclaw knew that Unknown and Glacynea had once broke into The Fortress of Ends in order to bring back a former clanmate to the Clan. If someone would be able to gather information about the strange things going on here in the Icewarden's icy fortress, it would be Unknown.
They both went to sleep, and when Fireclaw woke up in the morning Unknown was already gone. During the night he had a weird dream where he was holding a miniature crystal ball in his claws. Within the
he could see Fluffy's dimension, the weird house on the hill, a box, and cat meows echoing from within the crystal. Was this dream a vision or just a dream? He wasn't sure, but he'd make sure to tell Unknown about it next time he saw him.
Fireclaw felt incredibly well-rested despite all the shenanigans he had gotten himself into, so he figured he'd would join the Cross-Country Skiing event, and then he'd go over to the Cats' Choice Awards to take on whatever challenge they had prepared.
The
Cross-Country Skiing event was exhausting, but fun, and when he arrived at the place where the cats' daily challenge would take place, he found out that the challenge would consist of putting on a show - with magic. No regular earth-shattering magic, just the fancy kind used in spectacles.
This would prove to be hard, 'cause the weather had been rough out in the field during the skiing event, so once he had finished the event he used quite a it of magic to warm himself up, and his magic was already drained from the previous days shenanigans... .
His performance was a disaster; he attempted to summon out molten crystals from the earth, but the permafrost inside it made it difficult. In the end, he could just summon some crystals and have some tiny flecks of Fire and embers floating around them. Unable to come up with anything more spectacular than this, he shuffled away awkwardly from everyone's view and hid among the public.
After this, he decided he would try to find Unknown or look around the place to see if he could figure out the answers to some of the mysteries this place held, but Mia the cat interrupted him on his way to ask if he had managed to find out where Toby was.
''I actually do think I know where to find him, but I'm not sure if you'll like the answer... . You see, I think he was hanging out with Fluffy in that strange dimension of theirs and somehow got stuck in a box? I'm not sure, since I couldn't quite make out was Fluffy said to me the other day when I met them at the explosion site, and they warped through the wall before I could ask how to help... .'Fluffy
is a friend of yours, right.. ?''
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