"NEXT, PUMPKIN HEAD!"
"NO! RUN JACK, RUN!" Mac shouted, and everyone did turn and run in the opposite direction of where the King was. The Scarecrow carried the Gump's head, heeding the directions the Gump shouted. Turn this way, watch the vase, turn there...
"GNOMES! SIEZE THEM!"
Things got complicated. Bursting from the walls, were the Gnomes. Horrendous stone monsters with long sharp claws, and wide gaping mouths. They reached out at Mac and his friends, trying to grab them. They came close to grabbing Mac's back pack but were felled when the Gump knocked into one of their hands with his antler. But poor Jack was as confused, and scared, as ever. Pieces of the ceiling were falling, and the Gnomes, it all caused him to just stand in the middle of the room and scream at the top of his lungs.
Enough of an opportunity for the King to reach in and grab Jack by the feet. Mac, cornered by the Gnomes with the Gump and Scarecrow could only watch in horror as Jack screams filled the air as he was lifted into the air.
Now upside down, Jack held on tightly to his head not wanting to loose it. The top of his head, the tiny part people cut off in order to scoop the pumpkin 'guts' out with, fell off. Jack was slowly being lowered into the open jaws of the King, when one noise froze everything.
Billina was clucking her head off within Jack's head. The King's eyes widened in shock, the Gnomes froze in terror as they heard the noise.
"Billina!" Mac gasped, having forgotten about the poor chicken.
"Oh dear oh dear!" the yellow hen clucked as she stared down into the gaping void of the Gnome King's throat. So terrified was she, that she laid an egg. It rolled around the entrance to Jack's head, before it fell and plummeted into the open jaws of the King. He snapped his mouth shut in an attempt to stop the egg, but it was too late. He had swallowed the egg.
"Poison!" the Gnomes hissed in terror and sorrow. "Poison!!" they began to melt back into the rock, already beginning to grieve for their King. The Gnome King very slowly, almost mechanically lowered Jack back down onto the floor, his eyes beginning to turn from white to grey. As Jack landed, Mac and the Scarecrow helped him to his feet.
"Don't you know...?" the Gnome King asked, pieces of his rocky body beginning to fall away like a landslide. "Eggs.. are poison..."
"Poison indeed!" Billina clucked, insulted. It was the first egg she had laid in over three years, nothing poison about it!
"Poison... to... gnomes..."
To explain how the Gnome King demised is hard to put into words. He basically fell in on himself. Leaving a pile of rocks in the middle of the room. But the chain reaction had been set into place, the mountain was quaking from the death of the King, and the volcano was rumbling louder and louder. Just how in the world are they going to get out of here?
The answer all but fell at their feet. Mac could see, glinting faintly from within the rubble of what was once the Gnome King was a red flash of colour. The shoes! Not saying anything Mac rushed over and began pulling the smaller rocks away, until he squeezed his hand through them and pulled out the shoes. Kicking his sneakers off he pulled them on, before rushing back to his friends. He took the Scarecrow's leg into his hand, and Jack's hand into the other. Billina was still inside Jack's head, and the Scarecrow held fast to the Gump's head. "I wish we were back at the Emerald City and everything was back to normal!" he shouted, and clicked his heels together three times.
And then the mountain collapsed.
To be concluded
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