I was too busy trying not to trip over a particularly sneaky root to answer her. I managed it. Barely. I considered this a personal victory and did a small celebratory hop, which is when I tripped over a completely different root. Some victories are complicated.
“Watch your feet,” Biscuit said helpfully, about three seconds too late, as she adjusted the enormous backpack bouncing on her shoulders. She had packed it that morning while reading from a list titled Things To Pack, which was itself on a list titled Lists I Need Today. I had counted at least four separate bags of crackers going in. Biscuit believes crackers can solve most problems. She might be right.
We’d left Sproutville before sunrise, still thinking about those scorch marks near the fountain square and the faint smell of redstone machinery Biscuit had detected. Somebody had taken every map in the village, and that somebody had left a very specific kind of mess — the hot, sharp-edged kind. But the Wool Festival couldn’t wait for us to figure that out. Rainbow Meadows needed help now.
We heard Rainbow Meadows before we saw it. Specifically, we heard a very loud, very determined baaaa followed by the sound of something unraveling at high speed. Then another baaaa. Then what I can only describe as the sound of an entire decoration falling apart one thread at a time.
We came over the last hill and I stopped walking completely.
The village was beautiful — or it was trying to be. Strings of colored wool banners hung between the houses in every shade I’d ever seen in a dye pot: sunset orange, deep ocean blue, the specific green of a cactus on a good day. Festival sculptures made of wool blocks stood in the square — a giant sheep, a rainbow arch, what I think was supposed to be a chicken but could have been a cloud.
And zooming between all of it, moving with absolutely unreasonable speed on four tiny legs, was the fluffiest, most furious-looking sheep I had ever seen in my life.
Snatcher.
He was enormous — well, for a sheep. His wool was a wild tangle of colors, like he’d run through every dye vat in the Overworld and refused to slow down. He had a look in his eyes that said I have a mission and that mission is chaos. Even as I watched, he grabbed a trailing thread from the rainbow arch with his teeth and pulled, and six blocks of pink wool popped free and bounced across the cobblestones.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ve got this.”
“You’ve got this?” Biscuit said, already opening her backpack. “Because I also have Plans One through Seven, and Plan Four involves a bucket and—”
“I’ve got this,” I said again, and walked toward the sheep.
Now, talking to animals isn’t something I can really explain. It’s not like I say special words or wave my hands around. I just… talk, and somehow they understand, and somehow I understand back. It feels like the most normal thing in the world to me, which I’ve been told is not normal at all.
“Hi,” I said to Snatcher. “I’m Ollie.”
The sheep stopped. He turned one suspicious eye toward me. “Baaa,” he said, which I understood perfectly as: You’re going to try to stop me, aren’t you.
“Not exactly,” I said. “I wanted to ask why.”
That surprised him. I could tell because his ears went sideways, which in sheep means nobody ever asks that. He stared at me for a long moment, then explained, in a series of very expressive baaas and wool-fluffs, that the festival had been using sheep wool for decorations for years without once asking the sheep if that was alright. Not a single excuse me. Not one thank you. The sheep of Rainbow Meadows had feelings about this, and Snatcher had appointed himself the official spokesperson for those feelings.
“That’s actually pretty fair,” I said.
“WHAT?” Biscuit called from behind the fence.
“He just wants to be asked nicely!” I called back.
I was about to suggest we go find the festival organizers and sort this out properly when the air got warmer. Noticeably warmer. The kind of warm that comes with a faint smell of — I looked at Biscuit.
“Redstone,” she said, her nose already twitching. “And something burnt. Like a signal fire, but mechanical—”
Three small shapes dropped out of the sky.
Scorch Scouts. I recognized them instantly from the mess they’d left back in Sproutville — little blaze-like robots, orange and crackling, each one carrying a rolled-up map in its tiny mechanical claw. They swooped through the festival square in a tight formation, and as they passed over the wool-collection route map that the village farmers had pinned to the notice board, one of them shot a tiny beam of orange light at it. The map shuddered, and all the route markers scrambled into nonsense — paths pointing backward, hills labeled as lakes, the wool farm suddenly appearing to be located somewhere in the middle of the river.
Then they were gone. Just like that.
Biscuit made a noise like a kettle reaching boiling point. She grabbed her seven backup plans, spread them on the ground simultaneously, looked at all of them at once, and then went completely, perfectly, absolutely still. Her eyes went wide. Her mouth opened. No sound came out.
“Biscuit?”
Nothing. She was frozen solid, caught perfectly between Plan Three and Plan Five, like a compass that couldn’t pick a direction.
That’s when Snatcher headbutted my knee — not hard, just a nudge — and I stumbled sideways into him and grabbed his wool to stop myself falling, and that’s when I felt it. Something tangled deep in his fleece, wound through the colors like it had been there for ages. I pulled it free carefully.
It was a small square of wool, but wrong somehow — shimmery, shifting, like it couldn’t quite decide what color it was. It pulsed faintly in my hand, warm as sunlight.
Snatcher baaed softly. He’d found it in the old meadow, he said. It had been tangled around a fence post for as long as he could remember. It was mine now, if I wanted it.
I had absolutely no idea what it did. But I had a frozen Biscuit, three Scorch Scouts somewhere overhead, and a scrambled map, so I figured now was as good a time as any to find out.
I wrapped it around my shoulders like a little cape and thought very hard about being a hay bale — something harmless and ignorable that the Scouts would fly right past.
I became a dirt block.
I could tell because Snatcher took two steps back and tilted his head at me like that is not a hay bale. But when the Scorch Scouts circled back overhead, they looked down, saw what appeared to be a perfectly ordinary dirt block standing in the middle of the festival square, and kept flying. They didn’t even slow down.
It worked.
Biscuit blinked back to life. “Plan Six,” she announced, like she’d never stopped. “We ask the village elder to officially thank the sheep, repair the map by tracing the original farm paths from memory — I memorized them on the way in — and use Snatcher’s help to collect the wool because he knows exactly where every loose bit is. Obviously.”
I un-dirt-blocked myself. It took three attempts and one very undignified wiggle.
“Obviously,” I agreed.
By the time the sun started going orange, the festival decorations were back up, Snatcher had personally re-threaded six banner strings with impressive precision for someone without thumbs, and the village elder had given a very sincere speech thanking every sheep in the meadow by name. The sheep looked extremely pleased. Snatcher sat in the middle of the square looking like he had personally organized the whole event, which, honestly, he kind of had.
I tucked the shimmery wool square carefully into my tunic pocket, next to the acorn. I still wasn’t entirely sure what it was. But The Wool of Wonders felt like the right name for something that turned you into the wrong block at exactly the right moment.
“Good job,” Biscuit said, handing me a cracker.
“I became a dirt block,” I said.
“You became a useful dirt block,” she said. “That’s completely different.”
I thought about the Scorch Scouts and the scrambled maps and the redstone smell that kept following us from Sproutville. Baron Blaze — whoever he was — had now made a mess in two places we’d been. I didn’t think that was a coincidence. And I didn’t think he was finished.
But the festival was saved, the sheep were happy, and I had a magical wool square that gave me extremely questionable disguise abilities.
For today, that was enough.