The Rise of Greg
Page 1
ALSO BY CHRIS RYLANDER
An Epic Series of Failures
Book One: The Legend of Greg
Book Two: The Curse of Greg
The Fourth Stall Series
The Codename Conspiracy Series
House of Secrets: Clash of the Worlds
(created by Chris Columbus and Ned Vizzini)
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Copyright © 2020 by Temple Hill Publishing
Published by Puffin Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2020
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Rylander, Chris, author.
Title: The rise of Greg / Chris Rylander.
Description: New York: Puffin Books, [2020] | Series: An epic series of failures; book 3 | Summary: Greg and his Dwarven friends seek a powerful amulet in the hope of averting a war with the Elves for the fate of magic on earth.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019045621 | ISBN 9781524739805 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781524739799
Subjects: CYAC: Dwarfs (Folklore)—Fiction. | Magic—Fiction. | Elves—Fiction. | Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. | Fantasy.
Classification: LCC PZ7.R98147 Ri 2020 | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019045621
Ebook ISBN 9781524739799
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Cover art © 2020 by Brian Edward Miller
pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0
For anyone who makes a difference and even those who don’t
CONTENTS
Also by Chris Rylander
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1: Captain Smeltfeet’s Left Hand Squawks Like a Parrot
Chapter 2: I Somehow Catch Three Fish at the Same Time (Without Using My Fist!)
Chapter 3: Here Sinks Greggdroule Stormbelly: A Pretty Lousy Fisherman, but a Pretty Epic Failure
Chapter 4: The Thanksgiving Day Parade Kraken
Chapter 5: I Turn Uda Bay into the World’s Largest Jacuzzi
Chapter 6: Грэг Воняет Как Конский Зад
Chapter 7: Two Deaths Cannot Happen, but One Is Inevitable
Chapter 8: My Stomach Helps My Small Intestine Move Some Boxes
Chapter 9: The Way Sunlight Filters Through a Thin and Feathery Mustache Can Be So Beautiful
Chapter 10: Giant Talking Spiders, Trolls in Loincloths, and Sarcastic Centaurs Are Every Bit as Scary as They Sound, Even as a Joke
Chapter 11: The Sentry Throw Their Weapons into a Lake
Chapter 12: The Shadowy Forest of Endless Death and Destruction
Chapter 13: A Pack of Squirrels Eat a Reindeer
Chapter 14: Glam-Smash Boulders Undergo Some Modifications
Chapter 15: My First Hole in One
Chapter 16: Rock Troll Jokes Are About as Unfunny as a Punch to the Eye
Chapter 17: The Long-Lost Estoc of Galdadroona from the Legend of Sir Darormir Beardsbane
Chapter 18: Blob Blog Globbenblog
Chapter 19: The Time Sir Wylymot the Agile Got Flattened Like a Bug
Chapter 20: Never Wake a Sleeping Troll
Chapter 21: Grangahn Og Chongo Glurponderin Ih Ah Ggg Grongob!
Chapter 22: Blob: The Steak Sauce
Chapter 23: A Tasty Sack of Dwarf Brand Pretzels™
Chapter 24: A Couple of Well-Done, Rare Steak Puns Spoken at Medium Volume
Chapter 25: Bigfoot Is Not Only Real but a Total Kleptomaniac
Chapter 26: John the Riddler with Tiny Feet
Chapter 27: A Sublime Cup of Tea Threatens the Entire Mission
Chapter 28: The Rain and Blob Show
Chapter 29: Glam, Ari, Tiki, and I Bury Ourselves in Sand
Chapter 30: Riddle Me This (For Real This Time)
Chapter 31: Is It the Red Sea or a Red Sea?
Chapter 32: The Moment You Find Out I Won’t Die, at Least Not Until the Very End (Though I Hope You Already Knew That)
Chapter 33: We Find Out Our Existence Is Insignificant and Meaningless and Nothing Really Matters Anyway
Chapter 34: What Do Sir Neel the Jackal, Nobleman Rainaldus the Honest, and Ranellewellenar Lightmaster Have in Common?
Chapter 35: The True Tale of Ranellewellenar Lightmaster: Guardian of the Faranlegt Amulet of Sahar
Chapter 36: I Find Out That Failing Brilliantly Is Not a Dwarven Thing at All, but Rather Something Purely Unique to Greggdroule Stormbelly
Chapter 37: One of the Real Heroes of This Story Does Yet Another Quietly Heroic Thing (And No, of Course It’s Not Me)
Chapter 38: I Make Edwin the Most Powerful Person on the Planet
Chapter 39: There Are No Free Movies When Traveling by Magic
Chapter 40: It All Checks Out: I’m About to Get Eaten Alive by Slimy Sea People
Chapter 41: A Massive Larenuf Is Held to Celebrate the Resurrection of the Bloodletter
Chapter 42: It’s That Time in the Story Where I Ask You to Play Some Music (Yes, Really)
Chapter 43: Never Tell Me the Odds
Chapter 44: Non-Goodbye Goodbyes
Chapter 45: A Final Moment with My Former Best Friend
Chapter 46: The Battle of Naperville
Chapter 47: The Second Battle of Naperville
Chapter 48: The End of the World? (Or at Least of This Story?)
Epilogue: Because Stories Like This Always Have an Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
CHAPTER 1
Captain Smeltfeet’s Left Hand Squawks Like a Parrot
By this point, I hope you’d assume the day I got eaten by a Kraken was a Thursday.
But here’s the thing: this time you’d be wrong.
It actually happened on a Friday (formerly my favorite day of the week). To be precise, it was the fifth Friday after my friends and I finally convinced the Council to take action and send us on a mission to find the long-lost Faranlegt Amulet of Sahar. Which is said to possess the power to control magic (i.e., banish it from existence once again, or harness it for good, or use it for evil, depending on your intentions). And nobody knew where it was, except my current pal, Stoney the Rock Troll, and also my former best friend, Edwin Aldaron.
“Are we almost there?” Ari asked me as we stood on the top deck of our massive ship that Friday morning. “I smell like used gym shorts boiling in spoiled vinegar. I
need a real bath on dry land.”
“Hopefully by this evening,” I said, my eyes searching the endless blue horizon for any sign of land. “At least that’s what Captain Smeltfeet told me yesterday.”
We’d been out at sea on this huge boat for nearly four weeks. Which is how long it takes to traverse the Pacific when there’re no functioning machines left in the world. Ever since magic had returned, cars, phones, computers, blenders, and literally anything with a moving mechanical part was now dead and useless. Including boat engines.
The SVRB Powerham* used to be a passenger ferry that transported people and cars at thirty knots, powered by a couple of engines that generated well over ten thousand horsepower at full speed. But now the boat was propelled by a complex network of Dwarven-engineered sails and a team of four Bugganes* rowing with huge custom-built oars belowdecks. Of course, the trip would have taken twice as long if not for the added help of Dwarven magic keeping the sails full of wind and the ocean currents favorable.
“And you trust that Captain Smeltfeet knows what she’s doing?” Ari asked.
“Well, I mean, yeah . . .” I said, not knowing how else to respond. “Besides, it’s a little late to question that now.”
“No, you’re right,” Ari said quickly. “There’s just . . . you know, a lot on the line.”
She was right to be worried: we had put a lot of trust in a Dwarf who had some peculiarities, to say the least. For instance, Captain Smeltfeet had only one working eye, and so when she spoke to you, she tilted her head to the side like she was trying to get water out of her ear. She also had a talking “pet parrot” named Finnegan, which wasn’t a parrot at all, but rather just her left hand, which she flapped around like a beak whenever her “parrot” was “talking.” But if Dunmor trusted her enough to put her in charge of a ship embarking on the most important mission in the history of modern Dwarves, then I had to as well.
“Important cargo,” a voice behind us said, startling me so badly, I nearly fell overboard. “Important cargo in thee ship’s holds, aye, there be.”
It was Captain Smeltfeet.
How long had she been standing there? What had she heard? She directed her one good eye at each of us in turn, head tilted, a wry grin on her haggardly unnerving face.
“Important cargo?” Ari asked helplessly.
“Aye, important cargo,” the captain said, her fluffy eyebrows moving around so much it looked like they were break-dancing. “So says I. Har-har.”
“Important cargo, the captain says!” she then said, using her “parrot voice” for Finnegan, while she flapped her left hand open and closed. “Squawk! Important cargo!”
Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that whenever Finnegan squawks like a parrot, Captain Smeltfeet merely says “squawk” instead of actually mimicking the bird noise itself.
Ari and I glanced at each other. We had no idea what Captain Smeltfeet was talking about. There was no cargo on board as far as either of us knew.
“Umm . . .” I said.
“I know the preciousness of what be in thee holds,” the captain continued. “And delivered safely it will be, aye, so says I. Har-har! Magic comes, magic goes, but the stars, aye, the stars they remain. Dead and gone they may be, but their ghostly visages will remain, forever unchanged.”
“Forever unchanged!” Finnegan added. “Squawk!”
I assumed the captain was referencing how she’d been navigating solely by the stars and sun. GPS was a thing of the past. Most (if not all) of the thousands of satellites orbiting the earth were now either cold space junk stuck in an endless orbit or had come crashing down over the past few months, scraping across the night skies in flaming balls of disintegrating parts. The return of Galdervatn had apparently stretched even beyond the reaches of our inner atmosphere.
“Well,” I started, having no idea what to say to someone who might be certifiably insane, yet was also in charge of this vital part of the mission. “Thanks for getting us here.”
“We’re not there yet, lad,” Captain Smeltfeet said briskly, her one eye now scanning the ocean ahead. “But we will be soon. Har-har, says I. You, and I, and the rest of the important cargo.”
“Squawk!” Finnegan added.
Then she spun around and headed back inside the ferry’s top-deck cabin.
“You think she means us?” Ari whispered.
“The important cargo?” I said. “Maybe . . .”
Perhaps the captain had a point. The ship was filled with important cargo, if you thought about it a certain way. Not Ari or me, specifically, but all of us, as a whole.
This time the Council had actually taken us seriously. This time they were not entrusting our entire future to a ragtag bunch of Dwarven kids still in training. In fact, the only reason any kids were on this mission at all was Stoney. He had refused to go unless we were allowed to join him. So we were only here as “Rock Troll liaisons” and pretty much nothing more. Dunmor had made that very clear.
The actual completing of the mission (i.e., recovering the long-lost Faranlegt Amulet of Sahar) would be left to the professionals. Along with Ari, Lake, Glam, Froggy, Tiki Woodjaw (one of our new friends from New Orleans), Stoney, and me,* the ship was also transporting twenty-five of the best and most highly trained Dwarven warriors alive today: two squads of Sentry Elite Guard special forces warriors, and the most feared and respected military officer in modern Dwarven history, Lieutenant Commander Dorak Thunderflower.
Commander Thunderflower was a lot like our old trainer, Buck Noblebeard. They both hated smiling, loved scowling, and possessed an extensive knowledge of Dwarven combat techniques. But Commander Thunderflower was taller, stronger, fitter, less lazy, and somehow even angrier and meaner than Buck.
I, for one, would never want to get into a fight with the commander.
To be perfectly honest, his presence (along with that of his twenty-four elite supersoldiers) was immensely comforting. For once I wouldn’t have to lead the charge. I wouldn’t have to stumble and bumble my way through a mission that would be successful only because of pure dumb luck. In fact, I sort of pitied whatever obstacles we would face while searching for the amulet. I had no doubt these Sentry commandos were more than up for any challenge. For probably the first time ever, I was embarking on a mission fully confident it would succeed . . . because I wasn’t the person leading it.
This time our mission, and the whole future of the Dwarves, wouldn’t hinge on my clumsy mistakes.
Until, that is, I did haplessly sabotage it anyway.
CHAPTER 2
I Somehow Catch Three Fish at the Same Time (Without Using My Fist!)
It was later that afternoon that I single-handedly sabotaged the whole mission before it even got started.
“What are you doing down here, buttercup?” Glam asked as she hopped down the steps onto the back deck of the boat, Tiki and Lake right behind her.
This section of the ferry was particularly low, almost to the water’s surface, since it had been used for docking smaller vessels back before the world had changed. I was sitting on a small folding chair, near the edge, watching my fishing line descend into the depths as water flowed past underneath the boat.
“What does it look like?” I asked.
“Tis appeareth thine chum hath clutch ye pike o’er ye high seas sooth purposes unbeknownst,” Lake joked.
“Not for unknown purposes,” I said, adjusting my grip on a huge fishing rod. “I’m trying to catch a fish.”
“Yer doing it wrong,” Tiki said. “Back in the south, we just used our plorping fists.”
“Oooh,” Glam said. “Fishing with fists? I like the sound of that!”
“Well, we didn’t bash ’em or nothing,” Tiki said. “We used our hands as bait to catch catfish. It’s called noodlin’.”
“Hah! Such prepost’rous notion be’est thee?” Lake exclaimed, laughing at t
he thought. “Thine singular clenched fist be’est ye bait!”
“Well, since we’re on a moving boat in the ocean, I had to resort to a good old fishing pole,” I said.
“Caught anything yet?” Glam asked.
“Well, no,” I admitted. “But I’m enjoying the peaceful view.”
I never expected to actually catch anything. Truthfully, I had no idea what I was doing. But four weeks on a slow-moving boat is a long time, and so we’d had plenty to spare. On the fifth or sixth day of the voyage, I’d found a storage hold in the lower decks containing a few old fishing rods and some tackle. My dad and I had fished on Lake Michigan at Montrose Harbor a few times when I was younger. I’d always enjoyed being outside, even though we rarely caught anything besides a few small gulpies.
Since I’d found the gear, I’d fished for at least an hour nearly every day on the voyage. I even hooked a fish once, but it got away before I could reel it in. Like I said, I didn’t really know what I was doing. I’d just tied on a huge plastic lure with three sets of treble hooks and then let out the line, towing it behind the boat. It probably wasn’t getting deep enough to target whatever it was designed to catch. But I really did enjoy the relative peace back here and the endless seas (first the Pacific Ocean, then later the Sea of Okhotsk) that sprawled out behind us.
Mostly, I’d been spending all this time fishing thinking about the antidote to my dad’s condition.* When I was imprisoned on Alcatraz, Dr. Yelwarin told me that I’d never be able to make the antidote to her poison, since three of the ingredients went extinct thousands and thousands of years ago, during Separate Earth times.
But the prospect of searching for the Amulet of Sahar within a long-lost magical realm that had been cut off from the world since Separate Earth had given me some hope that I might be able to locate those supposedly extinct ingredients:
Three finger-lengths of tafroogmash root
A single wing from an Asrai Fairy