“Here we are,” Fred stated,“Do you think we can do it?”

“Yes. We might be told that it’s impossible to climb it, but I believe we’ll make it all the way up that mountain!” yelled Dan with his usual excited tone.

They stared up and into the dense woods together and left us three to decide whether it would be worth it to risk our lives to climb some mountain. Tim didn’t think for long, he ran forward yelling, “Wait up!” as soon as Fred and Dan disappeared.

That left Nick and I by ourselves.

“You know, I think I might have to go home, my mom wanted me to clean my room,” Nick whispered, staring in fear at the huge wall in front of him.

“Nick, we had our meeting in your room, it’s cleaner than any room I’ve ever seen! Come on. Don’t try to chicken out now.” I put my arm on his head and started to walk. Luckily, Nick didn’t put up much resistance.

We walked through a curtain-like clump of vines and saw Fred, Dan and Tim trying to fight a tiger. Fred was throwing rocks and Dan had picked up a stick and tried to hit the tiger in the head. Tim had been looking for a stick when we got in, but by the time we got to the fight, Tim found a huge log. It was three times his size and had tons of sharp branches sticking out the top. When he held it up, with one hand, it glowed.

Nick picked up some twig and through it at the tiger...it didn’t help. The tiger ran right at Nick and jumped on him. The tiger roared louder than anything we’ve ever heard and started to bite at Nicks face when Fred hucked a rock at the tigers head. The rock was as big as Nick, so it knocked the tiger off Nick and down a cliff that kinda just appeared out of nowhere.

“Yeah! Stupid tiger can’t take us!” screamed Dan as he ran onward towards the top of the mountain.

“Wooooh!” yelled Tim, running after him.

Nick was still lying on the ground, frozen like ice. Fred walked over to him,

“You alright there Nick?”

“Uh....ah.”

Fred turned to me and said,

“Steve, I think we might need to carry him. He’s already entered his mental safe zone. Only way he will come out is if we have bacon, and we obviously don’t have any of that.”

“Bacon? Is that what it is today? Why don’t we just go get some from home?”

“That would take fifteen minutes! We can’t waste that much time!”

We heard a roar, it sounded far off, but it still was loud enough to startle Fred and I. We looked around. A few seconds later, the tiger jumped over the side of the cliff, snatched up Nick and ran all the way to the top of a tree. The tiger seemed to perfectly fine after the fall, but really angry. It hung Nick on the top branch by the back of his shirt and jumped all the way down to where Fred and I stood. Fred ran off to grab some rocks, I...stood still. It seemed to be the only good thing to do at the time. I stood perfectly still allowing the tiger to walk around me very slowly, judging to see if I was even worth the effort to eat. Then as the tiger seemed to decide that I was not worth the effort and was walking off, Fred popped out from behind a tree and started hurling rocks at it. None hit! Three hit me though, one in the leg, one in the stomach and one in the shoulder.

“Ah! Sorry Steve, I didn’t know the tiger moved.” yelled Fred, a bit too loudly, because at the sound of his voice, the tiger whipped around and sprinted right at Fred. Fred turned and ran away as fast as he could, but in the time it took Fred to run ten feet, the tiger ran a hundred. The tiger caught up in about a second and jumped for Fred, his teeth shining in the sun. I stood there with my mouth wide open and my arms clutching my wounds, looking like an idiot. Then, time seemed to go very slow, so slow the tiger was basically stopped mid-air, then from directly above them came Tim, holding his massive log and he swung it right on the frozen tiger. Time went back to normal and on the side of the dead tiger was a zipper. I walked over and unzipped the tiger. Probably not something you hear everyday. I opened very slowly and carefully, a bit too slow though, Fred pushed me out the way and quickly unzipped the tiger. Immediately, there was a strong that none of us could really put a name to, none of us looked in the tiger, but looked around, trying to figure out what the smell was. A few seconds later, Dan burst through the trees yelling, “BACON!” Then we all ate the bacon and continued on our way up the mountain.

As we were walking, Fred walked into some trap and was taken by some natives. When we got to their base we saw that they were warlike people and the only way we could pacify them was with the smell of the bacon. It was Dan’s idea, like usual, but it didn’t actually seem like a good idea for long, they really liked the smell of bacon. They smelt us very intensely, it was too much for and we ran. They only chased us for half an hour though. They stopped because we fell off a cliff into a lake.. The conversation was light after that experience.

“Thanks for that you guys.”

“Oh, yeah...no problem Fred...no problem at all.”

“Hey, Tim, don’t be mean, we have to just learn from our mistakes and be happy about our victories.”

“Dan, what were the victories there?”

“Well, Steve, we eventually outran them and made them lose our trail by jumping in this lake.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know how that really counted as a victory, we did it by accident. But I didn’t want to make tension so I stopped talking.
We started to swim towards the top of the mountain, which we then decided to name Tom, T.op O.f the M.ountain, when some dolphins swam underneath us and lifted us so we were riding on their backs. They were really fast so we got to the other end of the lake really fast. The rest of the way was really boring, so I’ll skip it for you so you wont be bored out of your mind. All we did was swordfight knights, find tons of gold, save some random damsel in distress who somehow caught her dress under a boulder, and learn magic.

So after all that boring stuff and learning magic, we teleported ourselves up to Tom. “Wooh!”, “Yippey!”, and “Yeah!” were the only things I heard for three minutes. When we finally calmed down and sat for lunch, we heard someone clear their throat.

“So, none of you could think of me? none of you could remember me when I got placed on the top of a tree? None of you thought it might be a good idea to try and save me?”

We all turned in silence. Nick stood next to a tree in full gold armor, a gold sword grasped gently in his right hand and in his left a leash to some panther.

“After I woke up from the smell of bacon, I got knocked of the tree by a seagull, fell in some cave with the stuff and had to fight hundreds of things to get out, and I found a beautiful stallion waiting outside, I used him to ride up the trail to get here. I’ve been waiting for hours.”
We all looked at each other in disbelief. This was Nick right? The little scared kid who was to scared to even open up the cupboards in his kitchen because they might have monsters, no way he could do any of this stuff.

We sat in silence.

“Well? Tell me why I should still be your friend.”

Dan made a good point,

“We’ve always had your back and forgave your mistakes.”

The group looked at each other and all nodded.

“Yes Dan, but I have never left you in a tree. I think that I should be going.”

He instantly ran towards the trees again, coming back a few seconds later on a all white stallion in full gallop.

“I am now too good for you and your games of make belief!”

“No, come on Nick, we had our own problems to deal with!” pleaded Fred.

“You did not! This whole thing is fake! This mountain is only a little hill with a few trees and a pond! You had absolutely no problems to deal with to make you forget about me! Honestly, you look like idiots rolling around like that and throwing your stuffed animal tiger at each other.”

“What about you with your armor, sword, panther and horse?” Tim broke his veil of silence.

Nick though had no response and angrily ran down the hill and back inside.

Then I realized something, “Do you guys think that class has started?”

We all ran after Nick and completely forgot about our adventure.