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After a second, his eyes went wide, and he winced before he backed away. “Okay, that was twenty-five or so.”

He cleared his throat and stuck the pipette into the vial again, then he withdrew more sap and dropped a few drips onto his own tongue before securing the potion.

Paige held her hands out in front of her, waiting for the sap to take effect. After a minute, her limbs started to tingle. A few muscles in her face twitched, and she fidgeted as her skin began to crawl.

“Hey, Dewey, I feel weird.”

“Huh?” Dewey questioned. “I mean, all part of the process.”

He offered a nervous chuckle as he buzzed around in the air.

“Really? Because I feel really wobbly and–“

Her voice cut off as her view suddenly changed. She stared at the ceiling. The bookcases rose above her, looming high overhead.

Dewey hovered above her, his lips forming a puzzled expression.

“What happened?” Paige asked. “Why can’t I get up?”

She struggled to raise herself from the floor, but none of her limbs would support her.

“Um-uhhhh,” Dewey stammered with a wince, “I may have used a tad too much.”

“What?” Paige snapped.

“I started counting, but when I got to seventeen, a whole bunch of the sap came out all at once, and I figured it was enough to make up the rest of the dose. But it may have been like double the dose. Or triple.”

Paige’s eyes widened as she lay on the floor. “What does that mean?”

“Well, instead of having a flexible seepy state, it means you’re just completely seepy.”

“I don’t understand. Explain this another way.”

Dewey held up a finger and darted away, then he returned a moment later with Paige’s phone. He snapped a picture and then held the phone over top of her. “Completely seepy.”

“Ahhhh!” Paige shrieked as she stared at the photo.

She lay in a flat puddle on the floor, looking like a steamrolled cartoon character.

“It’s fine. It’ll wear off in like forty minutes. Come on. We have work to do.”

“Come on? I’m melted, Dewey. I’m a watery puddle of Paige. How can I come on?”

“Just…think about moving in the direction you want to. Like slide to your left.” Dewey made a sliding motion with his hands, which jiggled like jello as he moved them.

Paige tried to shake her head, but instead, her flat features merely wobbled back and forth. She concentrated on sliding toward the archive door. Within seconds, she barreled toward it, another scream escaping her flattened lips as she assumed she’d smack into it and slosh around.

Instead, she slipped right under the door, appearing on the other side in a long, dark hallway. Lights hung overhead. She continued flowing down the hall.

A flattened version of Dewey slithering through the crack between the doorjamb and the door, jiggling back into a three-dimensional version of himself as he popped through.

“Slow down!” he said. “Moving is hard when you’re jelly.”

“Yeah, well, moving isn’t hard when you’re a puddle of slime, so keep up.”

They reached a set of stairs leading downward. Paige dripped down the length of them, then she pooled together at the bottom before she slipped under the next door.

The archive spread out below them as they entered.