Imagine Ch16

"Sadness is something you can choose to be. You can be sad and cry and waste all that time when you could've been having fun." Odette said after watching Isabella stare at Phineas for the longest time.
"And your point is?" The raven-haired teenager cocked an eyebrow. She wasn't in the mood for teasing or mockery. She didn't want to be mean, but Odette was beginning to irritate her. The witch had been watching her ever sense they got out of the cave and Isabella just wanted to talk to Phineas alone. It didn't matter if he was sleeping.
"You can only be sad if you make yourself sad." Odette smiled.
Isabella glared at her and then went back to Phineas. "I don't think you quite get the concept here." She huffed. "I’ve tried to be happy. Really. I have. But... with him like this he might as well still be lost. It kills me to say that, but I feel like I've been robbed." She shook her head. "I know it’s dumb to think like that. It’s just a little cold. It’s not like he's going to be gone forever."
Odette looked down at her hands and sighed. "I wish nothing ever went wrong. And sometimes I wish that rainbows actually rained bows so that I could have a bow and arrow. But that one hasn't come true yet."
Isabella cracked a grin. "Well maybe Ferb could make you one. He has the skill."
She glanced at Ferb, who was off in the woods not to far away.
"He wouldn't. He's too busy and he has too much to worry about." The witch looked away and her hair turned purple. Isabella watched the color fade in and take over, almost like paint changing the color of water. Her hair had been purple a lot lately.
"Well, he does seem occupied." The girl began. "But once Phineas is better, he'll do it. Surely with the help of Phin they could get one for you in less than two minutes." Isabella beamed.
"Less than two minutes? That's impossible." Odette sighed and covered her face.
Isabella could see the hurt that radiated off of her. It was like the smell of oil coming from a gas station.
"They're Flynn-Fletchers. Anything is possible." She half-smiled at the witch and she looked up at the teenage girl.
"I meant in that amount of time." The witch played with her bare toes.
"That’s right. Exactly." Isabella said redundantly.
Odette frowned and raised an eyebrow. "Without imagination energy they couldn't do it. Even a witch couldn't do that."
Isabella stopped and stared at the girl with a grim look. She squinted at her. "Okay... I can understand that there's a reason to be sad at the moment, but not you. Not the little girl that giggled her head off even though she was surrounded by lava. And if I remember right, you were just telling me that there was no purpose to sadness. Why are you acting so down in the dumps?"
The little girl let her hair fall over her face in shame and she covered her head. "That right there is one of those questions that are easy to ask, but not as easy to answer." She paused. "I didn't say sadness was purposeless. I said you can choose when to be and when not to be. This is one of those times when I mean to be." She sighed and looked up at her Watcher. "But I don't think you want to know about my problems, and I really prefer to just leave them behind. Times like these are when you happen to stumble across them again."
Isabella was shocked to hear such powerful words come from a mouth like Odette's. It had always been nonsense coming from her lips, but these words were wise. Isabella glanced over at the two boys that were sitting nearby trying to start the second fire of the night. Baljeet stood back as Ferb simply pulled out his Swiss army knife and used the mini blow torch to ignite the wood and set it aflame.
"I'm sorry." Isabella whispered.
Odette looked up at her and managed a small smile. They went back to watching Phineas. The teenager was still as hot as the fourth of July. He lay on the ground with a soft pillow made from an odd fuzzy plant they had found in the forest. Really all it was was a pile of fluff.
"Do you want to bring him over here by the fire so we all can be warm, or are you sitting in the cold for a reason I'm not aware of?" Ferb's voice broke the silence.
Isabella and Odette looked up at him. He had a piece of his shirt tied around his forehead in replace of a sweatband and another sleeve was tied around a small wound on his upper arm.
"If you keep tearing your shirt up like that, you're not gonna have one left." Odette smirked.
He shrugged. "I make do with what I have."
The sleeping red-head moaned and his eyes squeezed tight.
It killed Ferb inside to see Phineas like this.
"We'll have to move him." Isabella pushed the hair out if her eyes. "You take that side, I’ll take his feet." She said as she wrapped her hands around his ankles. Ferb bent down and picked him up from under his shoulders. That would have normally sent him in a fit of giggles and kicks. Ferb smiled. Phineas was the most ticklish person he knew. Although nobody tried to tickle him, since they knew they would end up with a black eye, or some sort of bruise. Candace only had to get one busted lip before she decided that tickling her brother wasn't the best idea. Phineas didn't mean to hurt anybody. It was pretty much involuntary.
They sat the boy up against a tree that jutted up from the ground no more than five feet away from the fire.
"When is he going to wake up?" Baljeet asked in dismay. "I cannot take it. He is scaring me."
Isabella leaned her head against the sick teenager's warm shoulder. "Everyone is in the same situation. I want him to be better too."
"Shouldn't he have woken up already if it were just a cold?" Burnibus fluttered his wings in anguish.
"He should have woken up almost three hours ago." Ferb added. "Either this isn't a cold, or he's more tired than he's ever been in his life."
"I hope it is the second option." Baljeet rubbed his arms to keep warm.
After a moment of no talking from anyone, Odette spoke up. "So... back at the task at hand... we still have one more Watcher we need to find. We never checked to see where he was."
Phineas moaned again and started to keel over, but Isabella caught him and pulled him back up. He was a fish. Constantly moving, even in his sleep.
"We should do that right now so we can go ahead and start walking to wherever he is tomorrow." Ferb said tiredly. His eyes drooped.
"I'll start the potion." Odette said happily, as if she was never sad at all.
The teenagers and the pixie watched her set up a bowl and use the same ingredients she used before to make the mixture. It made her face glow and her hair slowly turned green, like it always did when she was brewing her concoctions.
After watching her throw in some more materials, they gathered around the bowl and looked in the rippling water. The image came in slowly but surely. It took about three minutes for it got clear enough to see the teenage boy.
His face showed a determined look, and he had a large scratch on his cheek.
Isabella covered her mouth with a shaky hand. "Oh my gosh."
Buford was clearly walking across something. It looked like he was high up because there were no trees or mountains behind him. He had his arms spread out on either side and he kept a slow and steady rhythm in his footing. His eyes darted up and down, but it wasn't clear what he was looking at. It only showed the upper half of his body.
"What in the world does he think he is doing?" Baljeet murmured. The others stayed quiet and watched.
Buford wiped his forehead and looked up for a moment and then back down. He was trying to balance.
"It looks like he's on a tightrope." Odette giggled.
"Are there tightropes somewhere around here?" Ferb smirked.
"No, but there's mightropes. They're ropes that shoot up from the ground near marshes and wrap around your ankles and they won’t let you go until you tell them a secret."
Ferb chuckled and then looked back at Buford.
"I don't think Buford would want to do a tightrope anyway. And by the looks of it, he's having a tough time." Isabella said confidently.
"Well we need to find out where he is." Burnibus said from atop Ferb's head. The boy hadn't noticed the pixie land, so hearing a voice come from his hair was a bit confusing until he remembered.
"How can we do that with such a small picture though?" Isabella waved her hand at the image in the bowl.
"If we had the jewels I would tell you to just imagine it to show more of him." Odette huffed. She looked sorrowfully at Isabella, and the rest of them followed her gaze.
Isabella blinked and took a breath. "I didn't mean to loose them! They slipped off my head without me knowing."
"Wait wait! You can just make another one." Baljeet looked down at Phineas.
"No, you can’t. If you kiss him just because we need a jewel, it won’t end well." Odette clarified.
"I'm sorry, guys. If I could go back, then I would have held onto the dumb thing while we were running through the woods." Isabella looked down shamefully and her hair fell over her eyes.
"There's no need for any of this. Look! He made it across whatever it was he was crossing. Everything’s fine." Ferb attempted at calming everyone down.
Isabella shook her head and looked down at Phineas. "No, Ferb. Everything is not fine. Look at us. We are in the middle of a very dangerous forest on a different planet. We have one sick and one lost and we don't know what the heck we're doing or where we are! Why haven't we gotten the castle to help us? We all know this is crazy! Why are we putting ourselves through this when we know that there are people that can make this a whole lot easier?" She shouted.
"You know..." Odette began. She furrowed her brow and gazed off with a perplexed look. "The castle should have found us by now and brought us back. Something must be wrong." She smiled. "This might be a good thing."
Isabella bit her lip. She hadn't thought of that.
"How is that a good thing?" Baljeet asked frightfully. Odette giggled and jumped up. "I won’t have to worry about being put in cages anymore!"
"But the castle is the main authority. If something is wrong, then whatever happened must be pretty bad." Isabella crossed her arms nervously.
Odette flicked her wrist. "Not my problem. I'll leave it to the goat."
Baljeet raised an eyebrow. He was never told about the castle residents.
"Besides, what is everybody worrying about? The castle guard is very under-trained. They couldn't take down a patchkin." The witch giggled.
Isabella squeezed some more of the remaining water out of her dress. "Okay... so it’s clear that we have to do this on our own." She sighed.
"Let’s just start up again in the morning. It’s been a long day. We found Phineas. I think we all need some rest. I know how frustrated I get when I'm tired." She sat down next to Phineas and made herself comfortable.
Ferb mentally agreed with her and found a nice tree to sleep under. Burnibus rested in his leaf hair, his blue body reflecting off of the green locks.
Baljeet stood there and watched everyone close their eyes. "So that is it? We are just going to go to sleep knowing that Buford is in danger?"
Isabella looked up at him. "You know Buford. He can take care of himself. He seemed to be getting along perfectly fine."
The teenage boy looked down at the bowl of water that still showed his bully trudging through the wilderness. "He is in the forest now. The forest is dangerous is it not?"
"Baljeet, we are in the forest right now. We're also in loads of danger."
"Should someone keep watch just in case?" He looked around at the living forest. The night's shadows played tricks on you and the flickering fire casting shapes on the trees didn't help make it any less frightening.
"I'll handle it. Just get some rest." Isabella suggested. "But you are tired. You said so yourself." Baljeet watched her yawn and lean her head on Phineas's shoulder.
"You're just as sleepy as I am." The girl protested.
Baljeet sat down under a bush and glared at her. "Wake me up in an hour so you can get rest." He sat against another tree and pulled his knees up to his chin. "Do not stay up all night long."
Isabella smiled. "Oh trust me; I don't plan on staying up all night." She let out another yawn as the Hindi teenager closed his eyes.
Isabella blinked slowly. The only reason why she wanted to stay up was because of the red-head sitting next to her. She looked up at him and felt his forehead. His fever had gone down.
She smiled and nestled her head into his shoulder. At this rate, he should be better by morning.
His chest moved up and down and comforted her into almost falling asleep. But she kept her eyes open. Even though she knew that they were in the most danger they had ever been, having her friends with her made her feel like she was safe.
She took a deep breath and listened to the forest. The wallows of the animals and the twittering of the birds were barely heard over the noise of the insects.
She did feel bad about leaving Buford out there. In fact, all of them did. But it would be too hard to go through this forest at night with Phineas like he is, and with how tired everyone is. If they were to come across something, they might not be able to fight it off. Especially without the jewels. It would be too risky, and everyone knew that.