11 A Bunny with a Plan

Chapter Eleven A Bunny with a Plan Abigail raced back through the woods and found the clearing where the bunny and Elias were working. The death bunny had chopped down dozens of branches, kicking and biting them off trees. Elias, for his part, was in the zone. Using vines from the forest, he'd tied the branches together. To Abigail, it still looked like a big pile of sticks that might be good for a campfire, but not much else. Elias was crouched down, working furiously. "Um, Elias?" said Abigail. She stood over him. "Please tell me you have good news." "Almost finished," he said without looking up. "Because Doug has brainwashed Finn and Vale, and Foggy just shot off into the sky. So I really want some good news."

"I told you they'd been Doug'd," said the bunny, landing next to Abigail. He held two branches in his paws. "Doug did the same thing to a lot of my family. He convinced them they wanted to live somewhere else with a beach. We need to leave. Now!" "How come you weren't brainwashed?" Abigail asked. The bunny tapped his head. "Nothing gets in here!" he said. Abigail could believe that. "Okay, finished!" shouted Elias. "Bunny! You grab that stick there and walk away from me." The bunny picked up a branch and pulled. The entire pile unfolded into what looked like a long, thin net. Elias looked at Abigail and smiled. "It's a rope ladder!" he said. "See, the branches are what you grab on to, and the vines are the rope. It should be long enough to get us down to the ship. These branches are all from live trees, so they should be wet enough to not burn. AND—"

Elias picked up a handful of leaves. "I've also rubbed the oils from these leaves into the branches, to make them extra fireproof." Elias beamed. He held up one of the vines to show Abigail how he'd tied off little looped knots. They looked like the bunny ears you make when you tie your shoes. Abigail wasn't sure what to say. "What are those for?" She pointed at one of the knots.

"So glad you asked!" said Elias. "They're super cool." Elias picked up a handful of small twigs. "Anytime you see a crack or hole in the rock wall, you can slip one of these twigs through the hoops and pin the vines to the wall. It will help keep the ladder in place as you climb down." "Me?" asked Abigail. "As I climb down?" "No, not you specifically," said Elias. "I just mean 'you' like you or me or the bunny. One of us, any of us." Abigail looked at him like he was crazy. "You want us to climb into a lava pit?" asked Abigail. "You're missing the point," said Elias. "The hoops are the best part. They're so we don't fall off the ladder." Even as he was saying it, Elias had begun to realize the problem with his plan. No one would actually want to climb down a ladder into the molten center of an exploding planet. "Forget it," said Elias. "We're doomed." He sat down on a log, and the bunny sat next to him.

"Yep! We are," said the bunny. "But at least Doug is, too!" Abigail was fed up with the situation. "Why is that a good thing?!" she yelled. "Why did you blow up a planet, just to spite someone you don't like? How does that make you any better?" Abigail paced around the clearing. "And how did you do it, anyway? You're just a bunny. How does a bunny become a planet destroyer?" "Just a bunny!" said the bunny, indignant. "I'll have you know only a bunny could do what I did." Like a bank robber who'd been caught redhanded, the bunny was all too happy to tell Abigail and Elias how he'd blown up the planet. "Listen to this!" said the bunny. "The planet's core is an ocean of white-hot magma. I know that because I like to dig, and I've dug farther than any bunny ever. So that magma, it's liquid rock, right? It runs through the entire planet through a series of underground tunnels and rivers. It heats the entire world! It provides steam to the hot springs, and minerals to the soil for the jungle plants. Every

living being on the planet owes its life to the magma." "Speed it up, Bunny," said Abigail. "Like I said, I'm not just good at chopping down branches. I'm a world-class burrower. So over many weeks, I dug and dug and dug, far away from Doug and his Dougy brain. Eventually, I found the mouth of one of those magma rivers. I kicked and dug (no pun intended) until I'd piled up enough dirt and rock, cutting off that river of magma. Completely closed it off." "And then you did that again and again, until no lava flowed out," said Elias. He stood up. "And once all that magma built up in the center, the heat and the pressure became way too high. The steam generated by that magma had nowhere to go. So it exploded!"