Be sure to check out Part I and Part II if you missed them!

… Matt and Josie observe the giant for quite some time. They take heed of his balding head, his hunched shoulders, his peasant’s attire. He’s on the phone, pacing. He looks agitated. They wonder if they’re supposed to try to break in, or at least knock. That would seem like the next logical step in their journey.

But something stops them. Do they really want to deal with this guy?

They’re each relieved that the other has no interest in exploring this particular palace at this particular moment. So they sneak away, unnoticed. Once again, the pair wanders. Josie thinks about her meeting again, which she’s surely missed by now. She shudders as she considers the charges she’ll be receiving from the law firm.

“Shouldn’t we be trying harder to get back?” Josie asks Matt.

“And what would that look like exactly? If we had gone into the castle, we could’ve at least talked to someone who knows their way around this place.”

“But he was on the phone!”

“You’re right,” Matt concedes. “He was on the phone.”

They continue their wandering for some time, deciding that they’ll return to the castle once they’re better prepared to face the giant. As their journey becomes monotonous, Matt instinctively reaches for his pocket to grab his phone. Neither of them has their cellular devices on them, of course, but his fingertips graze the seeds in his pocket, which Matt and Josie had entirely forgotten about.

“What about the seeds?” he asks her, stopping in his tracks.

“Matt, you’re brilliant!”

After a bit of scouting, they find the perfect plot to plant them. They dig with their hands, partially because there are no digging utensils in sight, and partially because they crave dirt under their fingernails, a craving they come to realize has been festering in them for quite some time.

They plant the seeds a fair distance from one another, giving them room to grow unobstructed. And then they wait.

Years go by, and Matt and Josie develop a love for gardening, picking weeds and cultivating soil and watering saplings. They sleep under the stars, atop soft grass. The time goes by fast, then slow, then fast. They don’t remember when exactly it happened, but at some point their homesickness had died out like a candle flame pinched by wet fingers.

Then one day, Josie wakes up to a nudge on her left arm. “Not yet,” she groans, assuming that it’s Matt. A couple minutes go by, and Josie is blissfully in her half-sleep, soon to be full-sleep state. Then, a sharp, painful stabbing sensation takes the place of the nudge. She opens her eyes to see a small dirt-covered, horse-shaped horned creature, and lets out an awkward squeal that wakes Matt.

“Holy shit!” he says.

They hadn’t seen any strange animals since they had tried to enter the castle, yet before them stands what can undeniably be classified as a unicorn. And then they notice a large, gaping hole in the plot where their tallest plant had been growing.

“Holy shit,” Matt repeats.

The unicorn turns out to be remarkably self-sufficient, and it augments their standard of living as they increase their efforts to take care of the other plants. As time goes by, more creatures emerge, and Josie and Matt piece together a plan to return to the castle, now backed by an army that the giant can respect.

When it’s finally time to make the journey, Josie chuckles gleefully at the rag-tag group of animals that surround them, making bizarre footprints in the disrupted earth.

Eventually they pass the familiar bush and peer into the familiar floor-to-ceiling window. The giant is still on the phone, but this time he locks eyes with them. Josie and Matt smile awkwardly, and he holds up a finger. They’re not sure what they had expected – a battle? A gracious welcome? He doesn’t seem all-too impressed with their army, which is admittedly smaller than his. But they find themselves devoid of any desire to prove themselves to him, so they don’t wait for him to wrap up.

Half defeated, half empowered, the pair returns to their plot to re-think their game plan. Is there anything left for them here? What was this all for? All this time they had peripherally assumed that they would find whatever it was they needed at the castle. But what did the giant have that they couldn’t grow themselves? And it wasn’t like the low-hanging fruit that started it all was even contained within this fortress. It was out there! Beyond Ventureland!

“Beyond Ventureland?”

It suddenly clicks. They’ve already gotten what they needed from this island. They’ve explored, they’ve made friends, they’ve picked up many valuable tricks. But, finally, they are sure it’s time to go. And without their angel wings, they’d have to find some other way to get back over the moat.

This task proves relatively simple. Matt remembers a graveyard they had passed earlier, a plot of land covered with the bones of failed animals. With the help of trial-and-error, they build a boat – one big enough to hold all of their far more successful creatures.

On the opposite side of the fortress from where they started, they try to make out what’s ahead of them. It’s blurry, but that makes them all the more eager to load their motley crew onto the makeshift raft, and to push off from the land that had finally lost mystery and wonder. The water sloshes beneath them, the oars push them along at a snail’s pace, and Matt and Josie smile at each other.

The fog begins to clear, enough for them to know they’re going somewhere, but not enough to know what that somewhere might be. It’s the unknown they wish to know, the fountain of endless questions and discoveries that lead to new questions and discoveries. They’ll find it, they know. They know they’ll know and then they’ll unknow until they know again. They know that they unknowingly know this.

That concludes “Scaling Ventureland“! But as the name suggests, To Be Continued is far from over. Stay tuned for next week’s article!