As they were passing through a particularly dark section of the road where a tree had grown across the path itself, they came to a quick halt. The very prominent purple archway formed by the thick tree trunk had been one of the plants the information they'd gotten had warned against. Aria raised her hand slowly and gestured for them to back away slowly. Apparently, this was a tree that responded movement through fine hairs on its trunk, and those hairs could be up to a foot long and nearly invisible even in daylight, much less the tiny bit of moonlight they currently had. They would have to walk across without triggering the tree or the roots along the side would snap up and trap them before they could say “alien”.
On Aria’s signal, they all dropped down to the floor and began the slow crawl across the jungle floor. Daisy couldn't help the shudder that went through her body as she touched the cold ground. Hoping against hope that one of the giant millipede that had been mentioned was not going to make an appearance as they were crawling, she began the crawl.
It was a very tedious process, but unavoidable if they wanted to remain alive. Soon they were safely on the other side of the tree and resuming a brisk pace one more. Daisy continued to grow anxious however. Their incredible luck to avoid running into any of the forest’s less stationary inhabitants up to this point couldn’t possibly hold for too much longer.
Then she heard it, a small rattling sound coming from their far left. Daisy let out a sigh. She had probably jinxed them with her stupid paranoia. She tapped on Aria’s shoulder, giving her the signal that she’d heard a suspicious noise behind them. Aria nodded and signaled for everyone to start moving faster and keep their ears strained.
“If anyone gets a visual of something chasing us, start running immediately,” whispered Aria after that, “don’t stop to identify it, most things in here are faster than us so we’ll be getting a closer look even if we start running.”
“Let’s hope it’s just a closer look and not a closer taste or something,” said Harry, “okay...wait a minute…I meant, it’s gonna get a taste of us…you know what…let’s not continue down that though process, let’s just keep moving.”
“I second that,” said Daisy.
With that, they moved as fast as they could through the path. Lucky for them, they were still on the path, which while overgrown wouldn’t be nearly as hard to travel through as the forest floor would be. They didn’t hear another noise for a bit, almost long enough to convince Daisy that maybe she’d just been hearing things and there was nothing behind them after all. And the she heard it again. A tiny rattling sound, this time louder than before, coming from somewhere behind them. Katie seemed to have heard it too and the two of them began to run, which was the signal for everyone to break into a run.
Just as the five of them burst into a run, the sounds behind them immediately started to be accompanied by a small thudding sound getting increasingly louder by the minute. The rattling sound also started to increase in volume and pitch.
Daisy didn’t dare look back at what was chasing them. Not that her mind didn’t try to dream up a creature that was a cross between a rattlesnake and a komodo dragon. Pushing the images aside however, she kept running, keeping pace with the rest of the group.
The sounds behind them only kept increasing however, with loud hissing starting to get added into the mix. Daisy was now quite sure it had to be some kind of mutant lizard…probably not a snake judging by the thuds that indicated some sort of footsteps but then it was from an alien planet; it could actually be some kind of snake.
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