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As Perilous Jack begins to cross the Druid’s pool on the mounds of vegetation provided, the surface of the pool is suddenly disturbed again.

Enormous mobile roots emerge like tentacles feeling their way across the ocean floor and latch onto the nearest mound of vegetation. Thus anchored, the submerged creature hoists itself out of the water. Suddenly a massive green face hovers over him, pointed at the tips of the ears and the sides of the grin like a Goblin’s face, but greater in scale than any Goblin face he has ever seen. Below the face two blade-shaped leaves sprout from a trunk of bulbous nodes, which swell in size from the base of the plant-creature to the underside of the flower.

“My newest creation,” the Druid crows. “I call her Medusa. A hybrid between the Beanstalk and the Piranha Plant. All the swiftness and size of the former and the predatory power and venom of the latter. The perfect creature!” he laughs triumphantly.

And now Jack makes a fatal mistake. Instead of attacking with his sword, he moves to put the Fire Flower in his mouth – and with eyeblink speed the plant creature whips one of its bladelike leaves around, sending both Fire Flower and the hand that held it into the pool.

Jack staggers back, trying to clutch at the stump of his severed hand while still clinging to his sword, and in his pain and confusion, he does not see the soft green tendrils growing from the mat of vegetation under his feet, twining around and around his legs . . .

The plants will feast long and well on his body, completing the cycle of nature. The Druid will create new and more monstrous carnivorous plants with the Red Bead that Jack has brought him. And the Fire Flower, nestled in the magical mud and water of the Druid’s lair and exposed to the strange radiations of the Red Bead, will blossom in new and unimagined ways. Yes, for many this is a fine day, a day of new beginnings.

But for Perilous Jack, this is . . .

THE END.

Return to 1 and begin again . . .

. . . or continue the adventure in Perilous Jack in the Land of Death.