“Ollie,” Biscuit whispered from somewhere to my left. “You can stop being a boulder. The guards went around the other side.”
I unraveled the Wool of Wonders from around my shoulders and became myself again, which was honestly a relief. Being a boulder is surprisingly uncomfortable. I’d managed the correct block type about forty percent of the time yesterday, which was a personal record, and I was quite proud of it.
“Right,” I said, brushing fog off my patched-up blue tunic. “New plan. We need to get into Wanda’s maze, find the hats, and get back to Blockville before the Grand Hat Festival is ruined forever. We have two days. What have you got?”
Biscuit unzipped her enormous brown backpack, which made the sound of approximately forty-seven snacks shifting around inside. She pulled out a list. Then another list. Then a list of the other lists.
“Seven plans,” she announced proudly, “ranked by how likely they are to involve us falling into something.”
“Which one has the lowest falling risk?”
She looked at all seven lists very carefully. “None of them, actually.”
We crept deeper into the fog maze, following the smell Biscuit had first detected back at the northern path — that strange mixture of old socks and sadness. She kept her nose twitching the whole way, steering us left, then right, then left again past a fake treasure chest that I nearly opened before she smacked my hand away. Good call. Baron Blaze had used trick chests too, back at Rainbow Meadows, and I’d learned that anything that sparkles suspiciously is probably trouble.
Then I heard something that stopped me completely.
Laughter.
Small, wobbly, uncertain laughter — coming from behind a thick wall of fog blocks ahead. I pushed through and found them: six Blockville villagers, all huddled together on a mossy stone patch in the middle of the maze. There was Pip, the small child whose polka-dot party hat had been stolen, and the baker without her tall white chef hat, and four others I didn’t recognise. They’d been wandering the maze for hours.
“We’ve been going in circles,” the baker said miserably. She was laughing because Pip had just tripped over her own feet — and I felt a very strong personal connection to that experience.
“Don’t worry,” I said, stepping forward. “We’re going to get your hats back. All of them.”
Everyone looked at me. Then at Biscuit. Then back at me.
“You’re just a kid,” the baker said.
“Yes,” I agreed, “but I once accidentally defeated a villain by falling on his Flame Tower, so I feel like that counts for something.”
That made Pip laugh again. And something happened when Pip laughed — the fog wall nearest to us flickered. Just slightly. Like a candle in a breeze.
I stared at it. “Biscuit. Did you see that?”
“The fog went wobbly,” she said immediately, already writing it down.
“Wanda can’t stand laughing,” I said slowly, remembering the way the fog had rolled in thick and heavy and joyless, the way everything about this maze felt designed to make people feel small and lost and quiet. “That’s her weakness. Happy noise makes her powers go wobbly!”
Biscuit looked up from her list. Her brown eyes went very wide. “Ollie. That’s actually brilliant.”
“I know,” I said, then tripped over a pebble. “I meant to do that.”
What happened next was my idea, and I want to be very clear about that because Biscuit will absolutely try to take credit for the organizational details, which, fine, she handled those, but the main idea was mine.
I organized the Blockville villagers into a parade.
Not a quiet, careful, sneaky parade. The loudest, most ridiculous, most spectacularly silly laughing parade the Overworld had ever seen. I showed Pip how to do my signature trip-and-recover move, which made everyone giggle. The baker did an impression of the mayor refusing to hold meetings without his hat, which was very accurate apparently. I told the story of the time my crafting table exploded into chickens back in Sproutville, which is one hundred percent true and I will never fully understand it. Within three minutes, six strangers were laughing so hard that two of them were crying a little.
And the fog walls crumbled.
Every real laugh sent another section dissolving, curling away like smoke, revealing the path forward. Wanda’s maze was falling apart around us, and we were marching right through the middle of it, giggling and snorting and making absolutely no effort to be quiet whatsoever.
That was when the Wither Skeletons found us.
Three of them came clattering around a corner, all dark bones and glowing eyes, blocking the path to the maze’s center where Biscuit’s nose confirmed the stolen hats were being kept. Everyone went quiet. I heard Biscuit rustling in her backpack behind me.
“I’m just getting a snack,” she whispered. “Don’t panic.”
There was a soft click.
A very familiar soft click.
“BISCUIT—”
The Lucky Button went off like a thunderclap. A pulse of golden light exploded outward from her yellow sweater pocket, and all three Wither Skeletons lifted clean off the ground, sailed in a perfect arc over the nearest fog wall, and landed with three enormous SPLOOOSH sounds in what was apparently a pond just on the other side.
We all stared.
“I was reaching for a cheese sandwich,” Biscuit said, completely calmly. “Seventeen rules about when not to use it, and apparently ‘while snacking’ should have been rule number one.”
Pip burst out laughing first. Then all of us did.
The maze’s heart was a round stone room with a low ceiling, and hanging from iron hooks along every wall were the hats. The baker’s tall white chef hat. The mayor’s fancy purple top hat. The firefighter’s shiny red helmet. Pip’s polka-dot party hat. And dozens more, all neatly labeled in Wanda’s curling handwriting, as if she’d been very organized about stealing them, which somehow made it worse.
We took every single one.
As we walked out of the maze — the last fog walls dissolving around us as the villagers kept laughing and chattering and celebrating — I looked up at the gray sky. It was still flat and colorless, still Wanda’s doing. We hadn’t fixed everything yet.
But Blockville’s hats were safe in Biscuit’s backpack, the Grand Hat Festival was still happening, and somewhere up in her floating fortress, I was pretty sure Wither Wanda was having a very bad afternoon.
“Right,” I said, adjusting my tunic. “One day until the festival. What’s next?”
Biscuit handed me a list.
It was, of course, the list of lists.