Arrow to Action

Noople tilted her head sideways and glared at the door. “Perhaps there is a special way to open the door.”

Quill picked up Grok’s axe and threw it. There was a snap like lightning ripping a tree in half, as giant hole appeared in the door. Quill walked up, reached through the hole, and after fishing about for a moment with his eyes closed, found the doorknob on the other side and turned it.

The door swung open.

“That qualifies as a special way of opening the door, I suppose,” Noople said.

Everyone hurried to get through the door, and so they all bounced off one another like too many basketballs thrown through the same hoop at the same moment. Quill squeezed through first, finding himself feeling tiny in a circular room large enough to fit millions of oranges in.

At the center, like the hub of a wheel, sat a pool of burbling lava. It was red and yellow and moved like a pit full of dancing kindergarteners.

The friends all stood and squinted against the heat. Then they heard a whirring noise, like one hundred flies had gathered around their ears.

“Noople, shoot an arrow, it’s Renald,” Quill said, waving a scaly finger at an object that was ascending up to the ceiling.

Noople knocked an arrow and fired. There was a thunk and a thump as whatever had been airborne was now laying flat on the rocky floor.