The Brilliantly Rainbowed Adventure

- Chapter 38 -
Ingenuity

        Now was the crucial moment, now the crux, the hinge-plate, the turn of the screw in Frogstick's life. The earliest moments of his sojourn, storied chapters that kicked off his restless romp through the fertile fields of Fictiondom, were mere warm-ups for the matters at hand. His big break had broken forth, spring had sprung all over the place, and Frogstick's great moment - his hour of decision - had finally arrived.
        Sheer ingenuity had led him to the toilet. Where else would his tormenters fail to secure this dreadfully sedate, air-conditioned prison? A closed water valve, a couple of flushes, a few bolts painstakingly removed, a pipe disconnected, and the toilet bowl was removed and set aside.
        Eureka! Gadzooks! Dog my cats! Surprise! Careless engineers had not sealed the bottom of the toilet. Frogstick had egress into the "Underground Florida" service complex, the vast network of subterranean tunnels that animated the great monster of Florida World.
        After the toilet was removed, Frogstick muscled the pipe aside and hammered heavily at the edges of the hole with a wooden arm from the broken chair, chipping away until the hole was large enough to climb through. Then he squeezed down through the hole, lowering himself into the darkness. He had descended into an unlighted area in which gigantic sewer pipes and electrical conduits ran in either direction. Light leaked into this darkened level from a grate in the floor and from the entry hole above his head. He climbed down to the grate and peeked through it, looking downward hopefully.
        Below him was a steel walkway, and below the walkway was one of the great underground thoroughfares that honeycombed Florida World. Along this underground thoroughfare green-clad Delta-Plus workers scurried, hurrying from anywhere into nowhere. Removing the aluminum grate, Frogstick climbed down onto the sparse steel walkway.
        Below him an electric forklift drove by. He crouched low upon the lift, terrified at the possibilty of recapture. Twenty feet below, a large group of brown-hued Gamma workers hustled by.
        Florida World workers were hierarchically designated in accordance with the letters of the Greek alphabet by order of the CEO of Florida Inc. He was a grim, taciturn fan of Aldous Huxley who possessed a keen if somewhat sick sense of humor.
        Into the well-lit distant reaches of the arrow-straight passageway the Gammas bustled, scuttling furiously away until they were only tiny brown smudges in the distance, brown worker ants disappearing into their burrows to reemerge upon command... or on payday, or at quitting time.
        "This is weird," said Fogstick, as if a Frog could judge the ways of the Newt. Then, to his surprise, he saw a familiar face below him. The face was securely attached to a solitary figure clothed in the green garb of a Delta worker. It was Jenny Simpkins, Slug's sister!
        "Psst," he hissed, "Psst! Psst!"
        She walked on, oblivious to his whispers.
        "Psst!" he hissed in panic, "Pssst!"
        She didn't hear him. His big chance to actually get out of this creepy place was literally walking away from him.
        "HEY, JENNY!", he hollered, "PSSSST!!!" Finally Jenny turned around and looked up.
        "Why, Frogstick Gutchins," she declared. "I do declare!"
        "Shhhh!" he whispered. "Get me out of this place."
        And so it came to pass that at eight o'clock on the following morning Frogstick was dressed in a brown Delta smock, headed out of Florida World with Jenny Simpkins at his side.
        About a half hour before Froggy tried to slip out with a group of workers, we fellow Hootenannies - together with Billy, Zeb, and the Old Coot - had been turned away from Florida World's Main Gate. Our feeble attempt flopped like a flounder, as you can easily guess.
        Thirty minutes later, we were trying again at the Servant's entrance. That second attempt led to a big scene, complete with hair-raising dangers and breath-taking thrills, chills, and spills that almost killed us all.
        But before we take a look at the unsightly mess at the Servant's Entrance, you are in for a real treat. Would you believe it? The great Billy Trembling-Lance himself has agreed to grace us with a chapter describing what happened at the Main Entrance of Florida World, where we were first turned away by the goons at the gate. I hope that Billy's electric prose doesn't elocute us all. Get out of that bathtub, kind reader, and stand on a rubber mat: HERE COMES BILLY!