Editing Leape (section)

== '''4''' ==
''In which Penn abandons Lethia for tourism''

Penn felt himself… change. It wasn’t like, ''oh no, I’m going through puberty,'' or anything. It was more like he, himself, was changing, internally. Instead of feeling bored all the time, he found himself getting excited by… weird things. For example, the lure of seal hunting… excited him. Back home, it wouldn’t’ve at all– he would’ve preferred reading, or just staring and watching paint dry. Even watching grass grow would’ve been better back home.

But here, in this new, weird, world, he found himself wanting to go seal hunting. Of course, he was expected to, as he and Lethia had been told very sternly that they had to help. And so, Penn did.

Looking out over the white-washed plane of ice and snow, there wasn’t anything that was terribly remarkable; mainly it was sheets of pure white that reflected the (albeit limited) , but Penn thought– and was pretty sure– that he’d seen a few polar bear cubs playing before their mother, who was large, even from a distance, pulled them into their snow-and-ice-created den.

“Let’s go,” said the Commander from the night before, whose name turned out to be Horace, which seemed an odd name for a commander that lived on a frozen planet, but that worked.

“Where?” Penn asked immediately, standing up from where he had been sitting, turning his gaze from the rugged landscape to Horace.

The man looked down at him from his vantage point of six feet, icy eyes matching the tundra. “Seal hunting.”

There it was again. A thrill at the idea of seal hunting. ''I don’t even'' like ''seals!'' He thought, brows furrowing together.

“Here,” said Horace, half-throwing, half-handing a thick, winter coat to Penn. “Put this on. You’ll meet up with Cayto soon enough.”

A picture flashed before Penn’s eyes, only lasting a second while he had been blinking, but clear as day.

Out on the ice sat a boy, maybe fourteen, a dingy fishing rod in his hand, obviously homemade, staring at the ice hole dejectedly. Dark hair fell into his eyes, looking something like a bowl cut, almost, but not quite, with plenty of hair grown out underneath where the bowl would be. It was hard to tell, however, because of the hood that covered his head which sheltered him from the wind and the snow… but also from anyone else.

He looked peaceful, in part, because of the peaceful landscape, and as he stared down at the ice hole, Penn couldn’t help but wonder why exactly he was fishing like that—everything else in that particular “realm”, as Lethia had called it, was relatively high-tech—when he could be seal catching or even something else.

Penn was snapped out of his thoughts about the fourteen-year-old by a hand waving in his face.

“Hey! I’m talking to you, ice kid!”

It was Horace. Penn looked up at him again, putting the heavy coat on. He blinked innocently up at the Commander. “What?”

“Let’s ''go''. It’s well past dawn.” The sky was still dark, stars glittering above the windswept landscape where the polar bears had been minutes ago.

“It’s dark outside—?”

“It’s dark outside because of that seal-forsaken sun! There’s winter months, when we don’t even see a minute of daylight, and then there’s the summer months, when the planet floods.”

“I’m sorry, the planet floods?”

Horace ignored his question. “We’ve wasted enough time, let’s ''go'',” said Horace gruffly, leading the way out of the camp.

It was ringed with igloos, something Penn wouldn’t’ve guessed would happen on Earth, but then again, there wasn’t a planet that flooded completely in the summer, either.

Lethia and some other ladies sat, working at some seal meat which was… well, dead, trying to get enough for the day, at least, to feed the people of the tundra.

The entrance to the little camp was guarded by a couple of the same people that had circled around Penn and Lethia the night before—they called themselves Rangers—, carefully guarding the camp, eyes alert. Even if only a snow hare stirred, they would know.

Out of the camp Penn and Horace went, travelling by snow speeder, something like the one from the night before, only an evergreen color, its treads speeding over the ice with a speed Penn hadn’t thought possible outside of Minecraft.

They arrived to a spot that seemed to be more inland than where Penn and Lethia had spawned—for lack of a better word—the night before. Horace stayed on the snow speeder, feet planted firmly on the floorboard-like-things of it, near the gas pedals but not on them.

“Here’s your stop, boy,” said Horace, ever gruffly. “Get off. I don’t see Cayto, but he’s bound to be here somewhere.”

Penn got off the snow speeder and looked around the flat landscape. It was snowy and slightly hilly, and he imagined there were probably polar bears nearby. “So, I’m supposed to just—”the revving of the engine cut him off, and he turned to look back at the Commander, who was now about ten feet away.

“What a weird kid Cayto is,” Penn thought he heard the man mumble to himself before he revved his snow speeder like a motorcycle once again and sped off.

Penn was left in the wilderness, staring around at the frozen landscape around him. ''I guess I’ll just die,'' he thought to himself as he started to walk around. That was the least he could do for himself—if he were to perish, at least he’d have moved from where he stood.

Snow was much the same anywhere he walked, however. It was packed and slick and there was a ton of water underneath it. Dark shapes moved under the water, reminding Penn of that one ''Hobbit'' movie he’d seen, and, remembering the ending, he tried his best to ignore them. Then he spotted Cayto.

He looked exactly like he had when Penn had had his brief eye-vision. He sat, staring into the water, dark hair in his face, eyes glued to the hole in the ice. Penn was pleased to see that he did not sport a bowl cut, and instead had shaggy hair that couldn’t help but fall in his face. Cayto didn’t look up as Penn came forward, and seemingly didn’t notice him, until Penn said something.

“Are you Cayto?” The boy looked up, revealing dark brown eyes.

“Why?” he asked, hook still dangling in the water. “Who sent you?” he asked, giving Penn no time to answer the previous question.

“Because I was told to come out here and help you… although I expected something more…” Penn gestured, “seal-ish.”

Cayto gave a chuckle. Then his face broke into a grin and he laughed. “Haven’t seen a ton of other tribes out here. Wasn’t aware you guys knew this place existed.”

This gave Penn pause. “Tribes?”

Cayto quirked an eyebrow. “You’re unfamiliar with them?”

“Well, yes,” Penn admitted, somewhat sheepishly. “I should ''probably'' know about them, though, right?”

Cayto shrugged. “Doesn’t really matter. They’re not very happy with eachother, though.”

“Hm?”

“Oh, yeah. The Tribe of the Moose ''hates'' the Hare Tribe’s guts. And then we have the Squid Tribe and the Whale Tribe, who have decided to ally against the Caribou Tribe…” Cayto shivered beneath his thick winter garb. “Don’t want to imagine what’d happen if they got into a war. I definitely wouldn’t want to be sucked into it.”

A smile lit up his face again. ''He seems glad to have some company…'' Penn noted. “Seriously, though,” the younger boy said conversationally, “what tribe ''are'' you from?”

“Well,” began Penn, searching for words. “I’m not really from… any tribe.”

Cayto regarded him with an emotionless expression. Silence hung in the air like humidity. “I see,” he said after a moment, nodding, “you really ''aren’t'' lying.”

“No… why would you think I was?”

Cayto was silent for a moment more. “I don’t trust people around here,” he said finally. “But I guess you’re not politically involved, so I can semi-trust you.”

Awkward relief flooded over Penn. “That’s good,” he commented, standing whilst the boy sat. Cayto took a deep breath before standing up, pulling his hook out of the water.

“Let’s try introducing ourselves again, shall we? I’m Cayto, from the Tribe of the Seal, welcome to the Planet.” He held out his mitted hand for Penn to shake.

Penn reached out, grabbing it firmly. “Penn,” he said in introduction. “Thanks for the welcoming.”

Cayto gave a wry smile. “You’re welcome. Wanna see the floating ice?”

The invitation was fast, but Penn had to admit it was well-placed. “Sure,” he said after thinking for a second.

Cayto took out a heavy-duty string from his pocket, wrapping it around the homemade fishing rod quickly, along with an old rag-looking-thing, before picking up the box he had been sitting on that presumably held his tackle. Then, with a look to Penn, he said, “Let’s go.”

Cayto’s quick tour of the Planet was… incredible would be the best word to describe it. The two walked past a glade of trees that were covered with frost and looked a bit like evergreen trees from Earth, although their needles were much more rounded at the end and weren’t like actual needles. Snow covered their tops and they glittered with frost.

“The trees aren’t rooted in anything except for ice,” said Cayto in explanation to how the trees grew. “It’s not like they could grow anywhere ''else''. I mean, the last person to dive into the ocean was Inam, and he was straight from the depths anyways.”

The words puzzled Penn but with all that was going on, he had no time to answer. They soon reached the “floating ice”, as Cayto had put it (although Penn figured that’s what the whole planet was, anyways), which was magnificent. Spires of ice reached into the air, grabbing for a cloud or a star or anything, really. Their counterparts, the stubbier of the towers, were planes that ranged from an inch to a mile in the area you could actually walk on. The moon glowed through the ice, creating an eerie glow… but Cayto seemed to feel just at home with it all.

He took a back path up a spire, and, to Penn’s surprise, there were bridges connecting the ice spikes.

“Home, sweet home,” Cayto spoke softly, wandering about his igloo on top of the spire—because of course, Penn reasoned, a person who lived on whatever planet this was, had to have an igloo (although he doubted that was true in the real world).

A dinner of fish that had been trapped in Cayto’s tackle box was hardy, the smoked creatures a reminder of home. ''At least it’s not octopus guts or anything.'' Penn stayed with Cayto for a few more hours, until the familiar tingling feeling passed through his limbs and a swirl of colors appeared in all hues, although, Penn noticed, they were mainly blues and greens. He glanced over at his friend as the colors engulfed him, and noticed his back was turned. ''I don’t want to go!'' he thought before he was whisked off into who knew what world.